Thank you for the suggestion. this is what I got so far. I repartitioned the disk with a 500mb primary partition for DOS (06) (some of my pc friends insisted I put DOS as the first one :-), forllowed with two 300mb primary linux partitions, and a 64mb logical linux swap, and 3 or 4 logical partitions. i installed Win95 first. ( after all the time wasted, I finally figured out Win95 install chews up the MBR), and then installed BC (bc /i 3), which worked great. I could select different boot partition without problem. Then I installed Linux from 6 floppies into the 2nd partition, and make the hard disk bootable (I suppose that made LILO installed onto the 2nd partiton) but didn't touch the MBR. When I restart, first I got to see the BC, and select the Debian (2nd) partition, and saw "LILO Loading Linux Uncompressing Linux..." "crc error System halted"
and it just died there. btw, can someone explain to me this error. I am really a newbie. I could boot from the custom boot floopy without problem. here is the /etc/lilo.conf I can't think of a way to attach the file, so I am typing it in. -- boot=/dev/hda2 root=/dev/hda2 compact install=/boot/boot.b map=/boot/map vga=normal delay=20 image=/vmlinuz label=Linux read-only -- /vmlinuz points at /boot/vmlinuz-2.0.27, which is there. Also I was trying to use dselect to do the install from Yggdrasil Winter 97 CD collection's Debian 1.1 i386 distribution. dselect asked me to "enter the block device name" what I suppose to enter. also, I read some where that i can mount the CD with command like mount -r -t iso9660 /dev/sonycd_31a /mnt but sonycd_31a is not there. Is there any other device I can use? I will probably have a lot more questions to come :-) please also cc the reply to me. thank you. -- Ray Zhang ~{UESjLo~} [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cnd.org/HYPLAN/ray/ -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]