I'm trying to install Debian on a fairly new machine, a Celeron 2GHz, ASUS P4S800 mainboard with SiS 648FX chipset, onboard NVidia Geforce video card, Award BIOS. It worked fine with the proprietary OS it had when I bought it.
I just ran the Debian stable business card iso install disc, and re-partitioned and formatted the hard drive. But when I reboot without a CD in the drive, when GRUB should come up I get a black screen instead. Knoppix and Ubuntu Live CDs work fine, which is where I'm writing this email from. I've also tried using the Debian install disc as a rescue disc, ie: linux root=/dev/hda1 but I get a "VFS: Cannot open root device" kernel panic. Perhaps I'm just not using the rescue disc properly, I've gotten this error before when compiling a kernel without the --initrd option. I noticed that the BIOS had boot virus protection enabled, so I disabled this, without avail. Perhaps the BIOS is still resetting my MBR even though this "virus protection" is now disabled, and I have to do a hard reset of the bios? I'm attaching the file produced by the command dd if=/dev/hda of=/boot/boot.MBR bs=512 count=1 in case anyone knows how to read an MBR backup. Any ideas?
boot.MBR
Description: Binary data
