I think the weird grub behavior I've encountered really is related to BIOS limitations. Following the instructions in the grub manual, I built a boot diskette and booted from it, getting a grub prompt. I then issued the following commands, with these responses: root (hd0,7) Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS root (hd0,6) Filesystem type is Reiserfs, partition type is 0x83 root (hd0,7) Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type is 0x83 I then issued the root (hd0,7) command repeatedly and about half the time I got the Error 18 and about half the time I got the filesystem type. As I mentioned earlier, my hard drive is a 200GB model and my motherboard is a Biostar P4M800-M7A, with an Award Bios v6.00PG. I'm now trying to update the BIOS, but I still don't know where to get information about the capacity of the current BIOS. I cannot find it anywhere in the BIOS configuration utility. My thanks to everyone who's helped analyze this problem. Paul