[ILUG] [OT] Dying hardware?

[John Kelly]

Heyas..
I was recently given another old 486 to add to my collection (My house is
where old PCs go to die). But since the specs arent bad, and I want to
give slackware 7 a tough test to prove itself, I decided to dust it off.
It boot to the floppy okay, but then I noticed some quirks. Slackware
prompts you to run "fdisk" or "cfdisk" to make your partitions. I'm used
to fdisk, so I typed it in, and it told me that I *had* to specify the
disk. 'fdisk /dev/hda', I typed, and made my partitions. I installed a
minimal install, and after that it told me to reboot. Except, now, right
after the system summary, where it should say "Lilo:" it says "Boot
error", and every keypress will just bring up another line of "Boot
error". What's the deal? Is the hardware gone? 
Or is it something stupid like a jumper setting?

Thanks

- jk