i have a linux mp3 player that boots up from a bootable floppy.and it is very slow. i want to gat it to boot up from my Hardrive. i coiped all tha files from the floppy on to the hard drive but when i turn on the computer it just says ivailed system disk blah blah blah! there is nothing else on the hard drive. help would be much appreciated.

oh, no... the agony of booting problems comes back to haunt me ...ahh make it stop! =) Seriously, booting off a floppy is terribly slow. There are two ways you can make Linux boot off your hard disk. The first and easier way: if your hard drive supports LBA mode (most hard drives manufactured nowadays do) and your system BIOS supports LBA mode, you can install Windows and Linux onto two separate partitions, and install the linux bootloader (usually LILO or GRUB) onto the master boot record (aka. the MBR) and that's the end of it. However, if your system doesn't support LBA mode, things get tricky. You have to deal with the 1024k cylinder limit. This means that any bootable partitions on the hard drive have to be within the first 1024 cylinders of your hard disk. So... first make a 10-20 MB partition that will be mounted under /boot. then you can make your windows partition. after that make your actual linux partition (aka. the partition that gets mounted at /) if you have space left, make a linux swap partition at the end. Using this setup, install the linux bootloader (again, its usually LILO or GRUB) onto the /boot partition (ie. instead of installing it onto /dev/hda, install it to /dev/hda1). Hope this helps.

i forgot to mention: LBA mode can be switched off in your BIOS. check your BIOS to see if it is using LBA mode to access your hard drive.