problem booting armada m700

[keitkeit]

I have a compaq armada that I cannot get to boot from hard drive. It will just go to a black screen and a cursor will blink. I switch the hard drive in another notebook and it books fine so I know its not the harddrive. I also booted the notebook with a knoppix cd and it ram smooth. Anyone have any idea what it could be?

[keitkeit]

Update:

I can boot from any cd and I have various cd's that let you browse file systems and stuff. I can read all the information on the drive with these cds but the machine refused to boot from the hard drive.

Maybe a 60 GB hard drive is too big for the m700?

It is a p3 850 w/320 mb of ram.

[DanU]

Just a shot in the dark...

Don't compaq's require some kind of boot/bios partition or some kind of "tatoo" software installed on the hard drive first? I don't have much experience with working on those old armadas. Hopefully someone else will come along and provide input. Just keep "bumping" your post till you get a response.

[keitkeit]

I got it. I ended up just making 30 gig partitions. For some reason these laptops will not boot anything bigger I guess. Why? I dont know. All i know is its working and i'm happy.