In message <20020703190022.F278@goldberry.poofy.goof.com>, "Aaron J. Grier" wri
tes:
>is the bootable partition marked active?  the BIOS might be ultrapicky
>about that...

It was.

After much fussing, I realized that this disk was last formatted under a much
older Adaptec SCSI BIOS on a much different kind of system, and that the
geometry didn't make much sense; I wiped out the disk geometry and tried
again, and this time everything worked fine.

Only the PC industry could have thought of drives that couldn't always move
from one machine to another, even with the same brand of SCSI controller and
the same physical connectors.

-s