This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0020_01C13174.B24F8DD0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable I bought a 18gb IBM Travelstar hd for my laptop. I installed the hdd, = and had to patch the bios to see more than 5gb, no biggy. Everything = looks fine. I setup the partitions like so: /dev/hda1 reiserfs 3500m /dev/hda2 swap 128m /dev/hda3 reiserfs 13,+ gb Slack installed lilo into the MBR like I told it and didn't complain. Everything went smooth as always, till I rebooted. It only gave me an L, then repeated 40 40 40 40 40 40 40=20 I booted using my boot disk, uninstalled lilo, then reinstalled and = tried using lba32. Didn't work, I tried linear, didn't work. I have not tried puting in the c/h/s yet, I didn't think of that till = just now, but anyway... Tried everything and it wouldn't work. So I searched through some old = boxes and (amazingly!) managed to find an old dos boot disk. I ran = fdisk/mbr fdisk /mbr (both) about 10 times in a row. Then rebooted. I just left it alone so I could see if it would give me = an error saying it couldn't find dos and sure enough.. Missing = Operating System... Now this morning I did a quick google search and found two sites. One, = in swedish, does me no good, as my friend the fish = (babelfish.altavista.com) doesn't speak swede. The other was english and it said that the L is the first stage loader, = good I knew that, second the 40 was an error code... According to the = lilo docs it's a seek error.. Turn off the hard drive and wait a minute = and try again, if it still does it there is something physically wrong = with the drive.. So why the hell does it work in dos?? I don't have a copy of dos or = windows to install on this laptop just to test, but logic shows if it = says Missing Operating System it would find the dos partition if it = existed..? am I nuts? Any clues? Before I swap this drive for another.. or try the CHS thing, = I really don't want to pull this drive out, I have to take the whole = friggin' laptop apart.. It's a 560E Thinkpad. Thanks guys. nathan ------=_NextPart_000_0020_01C13174.B24F8DD0 Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable