First clean install of an 8.1 system, on a dual PIII-550 system with 256M ram. Install went well, but after initial load of CD1 stuff, reboot into system failed with a 'no active partition' message... I re-inserted the CD, selected 'boot installed system', and got the normal boot selection menu, but whe I selected 'linux', I got a blank screen and no disk activity or keyboard response... I hit reset, and this time selected 'rescue system'. Once in, I ran fdisk, and marked /dev/hda1 (/boot) as 'active', wrote the partition table, removed the CD, and rebooted. Now I get the boot menu OK, but when I select 'linux', I again get the dead system and black screen. Selecting 'safe settings' gets me into the system command prompt mode (runlevel 3). I can 'startx' and bring up KDE as root, but no network connectivity as yet... I saw the list of boot options associated with 'safe mode' flash by too quickly to read, and I'm not familiar with grub - /etc/grub.conf doesn't seem to have the familiar 'append=' parameter that I'm used to with lilo. Can someone give me a quick lead as to how to find this list of options, and code them one at a time manually, so I can determine just which one is necessary to get around this boot problem? Rick Green