booting IDE-1: missing operating system so i boot from the linuxcare CD and ran e2fsck on hdb1 (mount /) and hdb5 (mount /home) it's OK. Also, fdisk puts a star next to hdb1 - bootable. Then did this "chroot /mnt/host lilo" with /dev/hdb1 mounted at /mnt/host. OK. booting IDE-1: missing operating system so what did i miss? -simon