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I took this to the installfest in hopes of getting it fixed. Thanks again to Jon and David A. for spending so much time on it. A little history, the original drive that was in it is a 4 gig IBM Travelstar. I installed Debian on it for a class about Linux some time ago, and I think that was the original hdd in this computer. Without any problems. I recently purchased a 20 gig Hitachi Travelstar used. The shop I bought it from ran a recert test and it passed. The 20 g is supposed to be the largest the BIOS will recognize, and that seems to be the case. I have run OEM software, "drive fitness testing" and "feature tool" without significant problems. At the installfest we decided we needed to run fdisk on the 20 g because it would not boot and gave me a "non system disk or disk error" when we tried to boot. The newest Debian seems to install correctly, and recognized the hdd as a 20 g, it even downloaded and installed some software specific to laptops. I ran fdisk from an old Win 98 SE install cd as it seemed to be the most contemporary software I had, then reinstalled the latest v. of Debian. I'm getting the same error. As I understand it fdisk is supposed to rewrite the MBR and check the drive, it did whatever without errors.<BR>
The odd thing about this box is that there is supposed to be a "Diagnostics Partition" at the begining of the HDD, David built me a CD with the HP tools to do this and it would not create the partition, even after fdisk was run. I have the instructions from the HP forum to create it and the tools now as well. The CD seems to worki flawlessly as I was able to access the BIOS and make and save a change and then change it back, (memory test then back to quick boot). I tried to run a low level format of the hdd with the OEM tools and it told me the drive was not a Hitachi drive, some problem there.<BR>
I think there is some sort of problem with the MBR on the 20 g, but I have not been able to find it, at one point, while trying to access the BIOS (pressing F10) I got the grub loading please wait then it hung at grub error 25, that was several reinstalls ago, and I have not been able to reproduce it since.<BR>
Sorry for the long post but I'm stumped. Bill Smith<BR> </body>
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