I am having problems getting my new install of Red Hat 7.2 to boot 
from the hard drive. I performed a pretty basic install and everything 
appeared to go well. The system will only boot from the boot floppy 
however. I have three drives in the system. The boot drive is an 8.4 
GB IDE drive on the primary IDE channel as hda. The other two are 
newer ATA/100 drives on the IDE1 channel of a Promise/Maxtor 
controller card. These are set up as hde and hdf.

When booting from the hard drive, the floppy light comes on, and I 
see a blinking underscore character in the upper left corner of the 
screen. The system becomes totally unresponsive at this point. 
Even when placing a boot floppy in the drive. After running lilo and 
grub-install numerous times, I started to think the the master boot 
sector was not being written at all. With each attempt to write a 
new MBR, the results were exactly the same - only the blinking 
underscore.

Just for the hell of it, I booted with a Win95 boot disk and run fdisk 
/mbr to write a new boot sector. After doing that I am now getting 
the standard "Operating system is missing" error that 
DOS/Windows displays when it cannot find a Win partition. I now 
know that a new MBR had been written. Each time I have run either 
lilo or grub-install, I still get the same message that appeared after 
using the Windows boot disk to write the MBR.

I am thinking that neither lilo nor grub is able to write the MBR for 
some reason. Would anyone know why? Following is my lilo.conf, 
grub.conf, and fstab files. I wouldn't think it would matter, but 
previous to this install, I had the drive that is now supposed to be 
my boot disk set up as a master drive on a secondary IDE channel 
with lilo placed on the beginng of the drive instead of on the MBR (I 
used a different drive as my primary with the NT bootloader to 
either load NT or lilo --> linux ).

Like an idiot, I upgraded the kernel with the rpm found on the Red 
Hat Updates site before getting this boot problem fixed. Now when 
booting with the boot disk I get a bunch of errors because the 
modules for the old kernel are not on the HDD.

If anyone can figure out what is going on, I could really use a hand.

Thanks
Mike Glaser

=========================
lilo.conf
=========================
timeout=10
default=linux
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
message=/boot/message
linear

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.9-7
        label=linux
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.9-7.img
        read-only
        root=/dev/hda2
=========================


=========================
/etc/fstab
=========================
LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
LABEL=/home             /home                   ext3    defaults        1 2
LABEL=/max1             /max1                   ext3    defaults        1 2
LABEL=/max2             /max2                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
/dev/hda3               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              iso9660 
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto    noauto,owner,kudzu 
0 0
=========================


=========================
/boot/grub/grub.conf
=========================
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to 
this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda2
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
# boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
password --md5 xxxxxx
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.9-7)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.9-7 ro root=/dev/hda2
        initrd /initrd-2.4.9-7.img
=========================