Dell 5100 install problems

Folks;
Due to the lack of other problem reports, I must be doing something really stupid.
After an HDinstall of 3.3 2004-2-9, the system simply says "Error loading Operating System".

On this machine 'hda' is the CD/DVD and 'hdc' is the disk drive. When I look at the /mnt/hdc1/etc/lilo.conf I see that boot=hda. Obviously, lilo can't write a new MBR to the CD.

I have tried to rewrite the MBR by rerunning lilo after a CD boot, but there are numerous permission and other errors.

So how did everyone else get this to work?

BillS

It's been a few weeks since I did this, so it may not be exact, but here's the jist of it.

1. Boot the knoppix CD
2. Open a terminal
3. 'su'
4. 'mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/hdc1' (hdc1 = your partition that holds the MBR)
5. 'chroot /mnt/hdc1'
6. 'vi /etc/lilo.conf'
7. Press 'i' to make changes in vi/go into insert mode
8. change /dev/hda or whatever it was, to /dev/hdc (the partition with the MBR) and any other changes you need to make
9. Press 'Esc' on your keyboard, then ':wq' to save your changes and quit vi
10. Still in the terminal, run the command 'lilo'
11. Close the terminal, exit, restart, and you should be good to go

I have done this many many times, both with knoppix and kanotix, works like a charm.

-pibby
http://www.pibby.com