ok... Ive installed two identical Compaq deskpro EP/SB's with Mandrake 8.0. Once successfully and one not successfully..... Lets talk about the 'unsuccessfull' one. Unlike its partner pc which boots into X-win nicely, this makes it past the 'Compaq' press F10 setup screen, searches the floppy and cdrom, and sits there with "Non-system disk or disk error, replace and strike any key when ready." I partitioned the drive in the same way, by attaching the slave drive to a win2k drive and ran Partition magic under Win2k. deleted the partitions from the previous O/S on the slave. Recreated a ext2 of about 2.5 gigs and created a swap ext of about 500mb. Shutdown the PC, unplugged the primary (win2k) drive, swapped the jumper on the slave to master, and plugged the ribbon cable into the new drive. Rebooted, went into the 'compaq' setup and changed the boot order so the cdrom boots first, rebooted, mandrake booted and found both the ext2 and swap and installed the complete O/S without any dramas. Mandrake finished installing on the drive and asked to pull out the cdrom and reboot which i did as normal. After reboot though, Mandrake wont boot, it just sits there with "Non-system disk or disk error, replace and strike any key when ready.." I know linux installed ok, its on there and im not going to reinstall linux again because i think its another problem, something i havent come across before. The other pc works perfectly. Have i destroyed the compaq boot thingy or something.? Also, in the compaq bios setup boot f10 thingy, it hasnt detected any drives except the cdrom... ie IDE0, 1 etc... Can someone tell me whats going on please?

First of all cool name. You haven t screwed up any part of the compaq bios setup. Just check your hard drives connectivity. I am not a frequent visitor to this forum so no email either bye

Hard drive connectivity.. hmm Im using two ribbon cables and ive tested them both... jumpers are ok too...

I reckon the linux install changed your mbr and the linux install failed. This caused your pc to no longer boot from the f10 setup partition and boot from the linux one. You can't access the linux partition cause it is trahed so hence the error.