Stalin : I received email from Svenson (of Daynoters fame) suggesting that I go ahead and swap out the scsi drives for the IDE drives. I have now done this, and the only scsi thing left in the chassis is the CD-ROM, of which I don't have an IDE model. So, The 8.6gb is master, and the 2.1gb is slave, so the 8gb should be bootable. I'll boot to dos, re-partition and format both, then let red hat have its way with them. I will most likely make /var and /home 1gb partitions on the 2gb drive as on the previous attempt with the SCSI drives, and put a tiny /boot partition at the front of the 8gb, with the main portion for / and a few hundred mb at the end as swap. I'll post the results!

Update: Utter frustration and failure. The 2gb ide drive is recognized, but the 8gb is not - limiting the 8gb to 2gb with jumpers worked only marginally, it still will not allow access to the disk, although bios sees it now. I'm starting to think that my problems are motherboard/bios related, and not Red Hat problems at all. The SCSI controller handles the bios for scsi drives, but IDE relies on the bios to identify the drives. If the bios is unstable, the drives would be as well. Without changing anything, I got differing results between several boot attempts. Sometimes bios saw the 8gb drive as 167mb, sometimes not at all. Once I changed the jumper to force it to 2gb only, bios detected it as 2gb on one boot, then not at all on the next. This is wierd. In bios itself, under the autodetection, I got the same results. It would see the drive and configure it at 2gb in bios, then reboot and not find it at all. So far, I have tried 3 scsi and 3 ide drives, with pretty much the same unstable results. The SCSI drives allowed the install of RH, but only once the 9gb was id 0 and bootable - other configurations failed to install completely or failed to boot after install. The IDE drives failed at the POST test by bios. Never got to the fdisk stage, much less the RH install. Solution? New Dell server arrives next week sometime. :) The only other test I could run would be to pull the 8gb out, make the 2gb the master, and try it with just one 2gb drive. Not excellent. Might try it if I get some free time though.