Re: bootable disk: how?

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost>]

Back a couple of weeks ago, there was a brief discussion prokmpted by
my message beginning

>> Okay, I give up.  What does it take to make a disk bootable?

This is just to close it off, and to get a note into the archives
explaining how I eventually fixed it.

After finally noticing the geometry issues (see the in-thread messages
about fdisk producing a peculiar warning), I tried stamping on the
first few megabytes of the disk with "dd if=/dev/zero".  Then I used
the 4.0 install CD to put a bootable system on the disk.  It's booted
just fine on each test machine ever since.

My thanks to everyone who contributed; even the remarks that didn't
directly point me towards solving it helped improve my understanding of
x86 booting.

/~\ The ASCII                           der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML               mouse%rodents.montreal.qc.ca@localhost
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B