Okay, thanks to Volker I made it this far... Now comes another odd problem. This system board has onboard SCSI, and I have four scsi devices: 0: an 8 gig Seagate SCSI drive 1: an 8 gig Seagate SCSI drive 2: a Plextor 32X UltraPlex CDROM 3: a Plextor 4X PlexWriter Anyway, in this SMP system (iWill DBS100 motherboard, 2 Pentium III's @ 450 MHz each), I get this far, and then the boot just stops: ... request_module[block-major-8]: Root fs not mounted VFS: Cannot open root device 08:03 Kernel Panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:03 And that's where it stops. This happens both when the system bios is configured to boot in the order: A,C,SCSI, as well as SCSI,A,C I've done two separate from-scratch installs, one with Kernel 2.2 for SMP, one for Kernel 2.4 for SMP - same results. /boot is /dev/sda1 swap is /dev/sda2 / is /dev/sda3 /pub is /dev/sdb1 Ideas? Am I missing an important lilo hardware parameter? Argentium