On these old machines it was often necessary to use a scheme called Logical Block Addressing (LBA) to allow MS-DOS access to the entire drive. Many later 486 machines incorporated LBA into the BIOS and once activated is rather seemless.
If the BIOS did not support LBA the drive manufacturer often included a utility that would install some code on the drive to add LBA as sort of a BIOS extension. These were often problematic. I've never played with GRUB on a machine using LBA, but had good luck with LILO. On this old of a machine, it is one area I would look at as I don't know if GRUB reads the drive geometry itself or if it uses what the BIOS tells it. It almost seems like as though the install took place through LBA mapping and now GRUB is trying to read the drive through its real geometry which more than likely won't work. - Nate >> -- Wireless | Amateur Radio Station N0NB | Successfully Microsoft Amateur radio exams; ham radio; Linux info @ | free since January 1998. http://www.qsl.net/n0nb/ | "Debian, the choice of My Kawasaki KZ-650 SR @ | a GNU generation!" http://www.networksplus.net/n0nb/ | http://www.debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]