switching from amd to p3

[Doug Sutherland]

Tyler, I believe disk boot failure is a BIOS error, not a linux error.
It can happen if there is no drive, or the drive is not bootable, it
could also happen if the BIOS boot options are not set properly,
usually listed as boot priority, you usually want something like 
floppy, cdrom, ide0, ide1 boot priority. If the cables all seem 
okay I the next thing to check would be if the BIOS is seeing 
the drive. On modern BIOS the drives will usually be set to 
auto but if you press F8 it will detect the drives and show you 
them in BIOS (may be a different function key for a different
BIOS). Confirm that BIOS is seeing the drive, and showing it
as master, then check the boot priority settings in BIOS to 
make sure IDE0 is in the boot priority list. There are also 
settings in BIOS for the hard drive DMA mode, the lowest 
mode being PIO0, which is original IDE. If still not booting
try setting that the lowest possible mode. The highest mode
is probably PIO5 or Ultra DMA, or UDMA 133.

At this point, after checking BIOS, if it sees the drive as 
master, IDE0 is in the boot list, the DMA mode is lowest
PIO0, and it still won't boot, I would suggest putting it 
back in the original machine and making sure it boots.

If it doesn't boot there I would check the partition table 
using fdisk or cfdisk or similar, check the bootable flag and 
make sure a partition is marked as bootable, and it's the 
correct partition, the one with grub installed. You can do
this by booting from a linux CD and running fdisk -l or
cfdisk.

If BIOS on target system is seeing the drive as master and
the drive will boot in original machine, then I'd say its time
to try a different drive in target motherboard to make sure
the IDE controller is working okay.

  -- Doug