Test machine will not boot after installing Untangle

[mrsmith]

I have some old Gateway e4100 desktops that I'm using as test boxes. I've installed untangle on two of them. The install proceeds just fine, but when I reboot them afterwards for the first time, they simply won't boot. They don't even go through POST it looks like. They just stay stuck on the initial "gateway" splash screen with hit F10 for boot order or F2 for bios. I'm not even able to get into the bios or change the boot order at this point.

I have found that if I disconnect the hard drive, the machines will boot fine. This behavior persists only when I have the hard drives connected. I even pulled one of the hard drives out and reformatted to FAT32 it via a USB connection just to see what would happen. The machine still won't go through POST.

I'm assuming there's something screwy with the MBR maybe. Any suggestions? Will I be able to test Untangle on one of these boxes at all? They're the only sandbox I've got right now. Thanks,

-Matt

[egowen]

How long are you waiting for POST to complete? We've seen machines where it takes as long as five to ten minutes for POST to get past a messed up hard drive. It does seem like forever!

I'd suggest putting the bad drive in as a slave in a system that is bootable and then using gdisk (comes with Ghost) or something similar to wipe the drive and recreate the master boot record (MBR) and partitions. Just be really careful that you wipe and fix the drive that is bad. ;-)

[mrsmith]

Hi, POST just never completes. I let them sit for a couple of hours. It is something to do with the MBR on the hard drive. I wiped the MBR on the hard drives and the machines would POST normally until I got the "no bootable disk" error of course. I also got the same result by just disconnecting the hard drive.

One of these systems just ran SLES 10 for me no problem, so I don't know that it's a bad disk necessarily. These systems did have some of their drives replaced due to a warranty-based recall of some sort. These two systems have different hard drives from different manufacturers I believe.

I'd really like to try out Untangle. I just need something it'll load on.

-Matt