Bill,
Remove the cd drive and the drive without the boot-loader,
and try booting with the remaining drive in the various
positions (primary IDE, secondary IDE, master, slave).
Be sure to set the jumper to "master" on the drive. If
that doesn't work, try setting the jumper to "cable
select" (cs).
Once you get the BIOS going again, try adding back the
second drive (set it's jumper to "slave" or "cable
select") on the same IDE bus.
If you can't get the BIOS that way, remove all the
drives and see if you can get to the BIOS. Remove
any settings for disks that aren't there (the ones
you removed) and just leave the BIOS expecting one
disk as the master of primary IDE. Or, maybe even
start with this method.
Do you know which drive and partition that the Linux
root drive is? If so, configure Boot Magic to put
that info on the linux kernel command line. Sorry
I don't know Boot Magic at all so I can't help with
this.
In grub, the kernel command line might look like:
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686 root=/dev/hda7 ro
Note the "root=" entry
Hope this helps.
bjb
On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 05:31:51PM -0400, Bill Case wrote:
> Hi;
>
> I bought the ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard with an AMD 64 X2 Dual Core Processor and 1 Gig of RAM. Installed it successfully -- I think (kinda). I fired it up and got my Boot Magic menu; chose Linux. Linux couldn't find my root partition. Re-booted. Tried WindowsXP; got it's trouble screen. I didn't want to deal with Windows just yet. Microsoft would probably ask me to re-register.
>
> Re-booted to enter the Ambi Bios menu to look at my hard disk configuration. My CDroms were set up as my primary IDE and my hard disks were the Secondary (master and slave). Didn't change anything and exited.
>
> Opened my computer, exchanged the IDE connections between CDroms and Harddisks to make my Harddisks primary and re-booted. Nada; nothing; zilch. No BIOS; no POST, no MBR menu.
>
> Shut down and switched everything back. Still nothing. I have reduced everything to a minimum input. Just the monitor, the keyborad and the power cable. Still nothing.
>
> Double checked that the monitor and keyboard are working. They work on an old machine. Tried old keyboard and monitor on the upgraded machine. Triple checked al my internal connections against the manual carefully removing and reattaching all connections. It still doesn't work.
>
> Every and all suggestions gratefully received.
>
> I am about to put my screwdrivers aside and start fixing things with a hammer.
> _______________________________________________
> Linux mailing list
> Linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca
> http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux
>
---end quoted text---