hi david,



as you can see, the problems are mainly over. i can now access all

partitions, although i still can't boot off win95.



the problem seem to have been that linux decided that the hard disks had

64 heads and 32 sectors, rather than the 256 and 63 that the adaptec

controller maps them to. 



when i got to the lilo documentation (how do you start up a printer?) it

shows that a single "l" indicates that the initial loader in the mbr was

unable to load the next sector in the boot process. it seemed to me that

the explanation for the rather bizarre behaviour was that linux addresses

the scsi blocks directly and thus disk geometry is unimportant. the lilo

loader however must use int 13 until it sets up the scsi controller, and

thus needs correct geometry. linux seems a lot like w95, the

documentation is good - if you can find it.



in the end, all i had to do was to go into the expert mode of linux

fdisk and change the number of heads and sectors. this gave a shoal of

rather alarming messages, and a total crash on shutdown. the scsi

controller totally refused to play on startup until i went in and

manually reset some parameters. after that, however, i could boot linux

through lilo, but w95 just hung. the partition looked good, but running

scandisk on it revealed major devastation, so i reformatted it and

re-installed w95.



things learnt:- when installing linux, take careful note of the disk

geometry that linux detects, and keep a backup of your mbr. what i dont

understand, is how lilo worked in the first place.



i still have no idea how a raytracer crashing managed to produce this

result.



thanks for your help the other night, i think that i may have to invest

in a linux manual (if i hurry, i can claim it in this year's tax (: ) do

you have any particular one to recommend?



                        Keith





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