Herby I am posting the solution, which worked for me. Thanks every body for input especially Mike McCarty. Here are the complete instructions for Debian 3.1 with 2.4.27-2-386 kernel: 1. Create a floppy disk so that you can boot into the grub environment by following : - insert floppy - cd /lib/grub/i386-pc - dd if=stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1 - dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1 2. Now insert above mentioned floppy, change your BIOS so that so that your first bootable media is floppy. Now turn the power on , you will see GRUB> prompt. Once you are In GRUB environment, type in the sequence of commands, which is in /boot/grub/menu.lst e.g in my case .. root (hd0,1) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.27-2-386 root=/dev/hda2 ro initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.4.27-2-386 boot
.... Now your system will be booted. Balbir Pabla
