Well, I solved my problem with creating a boot floppy to get my Gateway 2000 going. I thought it would be appropriate for me to share the recipe with everyone. If anyone else is dealing with this, I hope this helps! The original problem is that Gateway's large IDE drives have more than 1048 cylinders, which means you can't install LILO on them easily. The easiest solution is to boot from a floppy disk. Here's how to make the disk. (This assumes that your floppy drive is device /dev/fd0 (drive A:) and that your root partition should be /dev/hda2. These should be easy to fix if this doesn't apply to you.) 1)Buy an HD disk 2)Format it with the command: %>fdformat /dev/fd0H1440 (/dev/fd0H1200 for HD 5.25's, I think) 3)Repartition it with fdisk. type: %>fdisk /dev/fd0 The machine will tell you that you need to give it a disk geometry. Type "x" to get to the expert menu, then: (h)eads=2 (c)ylinders=80 (s)sectors=18 Type "r" to return to the main menu. If you look at the partition table now, it's a mess. I'm not sure I understand why. In any case, the next move is to delete all four partitions with the "d" option. Just type d...1 d...2, etc. Now make a new partition with the "n" command: it should be a primary partition, starting at track 1 and ending at track 80 (numbers will vary for a 5.25 disk). Finally, write the partition table to disk with the "w" command. 4)Make a filesystem on the disk. My favorite filesystem is ext2fs, so I use: %>mke2fs -c /dev/fd0 5)Now you can mount the disk: %>mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /flop (/flop must exist first!!) 6)Make directories on the disk, and copy the hooks for the devices, the boot sector image, and the kernel to the floppy with these commands: %>mkdir /flop/dev ; cp -a /dev/* /flop/dev/ %>mkdir /flop/etc %>mkdir /flop/boot %>cp -a /boot/boot.* /flop/boot/ %>cp -a /vmlinuz /flop/vmlinuz (The linux kernel is installed on your hard drive by Slackware 1.2. You could use any kernel for this, though.) 7)Make the LILO configuration file: /flop/etc/lilo.conf Here's a sample one that I used. -------------------- #Sample LILO Conf file for Gateway 2000 using 540 Meg HD boot=/dev/fd0 delay=25 vga=normal ramdisk=0 compact image=/vmlinuz read-only root=/dev/hda2 # (change this if your partitioning is different) append = "hd=1048,16,63" # (cyls, heads, sectors) label=Linux ------------------------------- Note that nothing in this file refers to /flop; it considers /flop to be the root directory. If you want to add a message, add the line message=/etc/message and then create a file /flop/etc/message with your message in it. 8)Install LILO on the floppy with the command: %>lilo -C /etc/lilo.conf -v -r /flop The -C option tells LILO what configuration file to use, -r tells it to treat /flop as if it were the root directory / Lee Silverman, Brown class of '94, Brown GeoPhysics ScM '95 Email to: Lee_Silverman@brown.edu Phish-Net Archivist: phish-archives@phish.net "Nonsense - you only say it's impossible because nobody's ever done it."