WAYNE CHIRNSIDE wrote in a message to MARTIN ATKINS:

-> TW> BUT the Western Digital Diagnostic program, and others designed for a
-> TW> similar purpose, that RUNS under DOS can see it unless the 
-> TW> Electronics are damaged. And that is HARDLY the case here since 
-> TW> the problen was created by a FDISK glitch.

-> But Wayne installed an OEM or a rescue disk of dubious quality over the 
-> top of Linux. And what's more he won't put the thing as master IDE 0.

-> When things go wrong i find it useful to pedal backwards at a rapid 
-> rate. Wayne won't put that disk C:\ and so i presume the problem is 
-> between the chair and the keyboard.

 WC> Wayne CAN'T put the drive on C: with the existing motherboard I/O,

Is that a matter of the MB not recognizing the size of the drive?  If so, 
it should still be possible,  since the MB BIOS isn't used once you get
past the initial stages of booting. 

 WC> the Promise Ultra66 I/O card does not support ATAPI in hardware as
 WC> did a previous BIOS'edc Promise card I had in the 486.

I still don't understand that part.  I guess I'll know better once I get to
fiddling with the ones I have here.

 WC> Kinda sorta hard to load the software from the CD when the CD Drive
 WC> isn't supported by the I/O card.

Not really.  I was gonna play with some of those boot-from-CD distros I
have on hand here on that Compaq (Knoppix,  etc.) and it's easy enough to
make bootable floppies.  That is one weird machine hardware-wise,  anyhow. 
I never did get going with it because I haven't had the time,  not for any
other reason.

It would seem to me that if you're getting the mfr utility to
"fix" that drive or if you use something else to zero out the
MBR,  it should be possible to go on from there.  I see you mention in a
previous post how you're getting another card with a different BIOS to plug
the drive into -- this is probably a waste,  since once you boot linux
ain't gonna be using the BIOS anyhow.

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