Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 3136
Machine won't boot from hard disk
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:50 EDT
I just installed RedHat 6.0 on a new machine we intend to use as a file server. Unfortunately, on a reboot attempt, the machine will not boot from hard disk. It goes through the initial BIOS startup and just sits there. No LILO prompt, not even the start of a LILO prompt. I have tried two install configurations. The first had a single monolithic partition plus a swap partition. The second used a small (200 MB) /boot partition and swap partition (120MB) and the rest on / (2.1 GB). All configurations behave the same. Configuration is as follows: AMD K6-2 400 MHZ ASUS P5A Super 7 Moterboard w/ ALi Aladdin V AGPset Bios Revision 1006 Matrox Millenium G200 w/ 16MB of SDRAM 3COM 3c905B Network card Promise Ultra 33 IDE controller 2.5 GB Fujitsu drive as the system disk on the motherboard Primary IDE controller as master CD Writer on as slave on the primary IDE chain (sorry, don't know which one right now) 3 - 10GB IBM 10GP drives, one each on the secondary IDE chain, and the two Promise IDE chains
During the install use fdisk to make sure that the first partition is set active. If it is not this has been known to cause trouble in rare circumstances with certain motherboards. We are working on finding out why this happens but best we could come up with is some BIOS incompatibilities of some boards.