Hard Drive allows OS install but not booting.

[dathi]

Hello,

I set up my system and installed Linux Mandrake 7. The installation went without a hitch. However when I rebooted the machine it detected the hard disk in the bios as normal then the screen went black with just a blinking cursor in the top corner.

Does anyone have an idea what went wrong? Is it the hard disk or the installation.

Regards
Dathi

[mairving]

Dathi,
Congrats on your first post. You might also post this question in Alternative Operating Systems. We need a bit more info on your system to help you also. Is this a system that you built? What kind of hardware do you have on the system? Etc. Also are there any other OS's (like Windows) installed on your system? Post back with these things and we should be able to figure it out.

[dathi]

The system is one I built my self. It is my first time building a machine.

It is an AMD 500 on a Microstar MS-5187 ATX motherboard.
I have one 9gb Maxtor hard disk.
STB 4400 AGP graphics card.
Creative Sound Blaster card.
Creative DVD drive with MPEG2 card.
96 Mbs of ram.
There are no other operating systems on the computer.

When I first set it up the floppy did not work but I got that fixed. It will boot from a floppy.

Any help would be appreciated.

Dathi

[Toaster]

Welcome to Linux.
For most Linux installs using IDE drives, one needs to choose "linear addressing" mode.
This is a choice near the final portion of the Linux install. In your system BIOS, set the drive manually or by "auto". In most cases, this will solve your problems.
There is a possibility that your IDE controller chip is not yet fully supported under Linux but I doubt this.