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(hd1)/dev/hdf yes this is a correct reading. I thought that hdf was wierd also. My master drive is called C my CD-Rom is D and my slave is E. Maybe I have the drives connected wrong, but they have always worked before. ALso, my partitions...I am installing Mandrake on its own 10gig drive, and I let the installer autopartition the drive itself. John

I tried the commands you told me at the console. here's my results......... grub device map is (fd0)/dev/fd0 (hd0)/dev/hda (hd1)/dev/hdf grub installs ok but on booting I get this error message GRUB HARD DISK ERROR I have a dell 700 about 4 years old I think I put the controller card in it because my Bios would not recognize large hard drives and an upgrade to Bios was not available. If I could just get into Mandrake somehow I would be glad to just make a boot disk and forget a bootloader alltogether. Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks Roland but I have installed and uninstalled boot loaders many times. Something is wrong with my hard drive configuration I think John

I had no problem with install, but I cant get Mandrake bootloader to work. Grub says there is an error and Lilo just gives me a screen with 1 L and many many 01's on it, then trys to read a floppydrive. This is frustrating, I can not get into Mandrake to try and make a boot disk. Any Ideas? I have 2 hard drives, first 1 master with XP on it, second 1 slave with Linux. I have an Ultra controller card for my hard drives. could that be messing thing up? I have been messing with this for 4 days..I feel dumb...thanks in advance..I hope John