Booting issues on 164SX

[Jeff A.]

Bear with me, I don't actually know what I'm doing...

I have a 533 Alpha on a 164SX motherboard.  I have installed NT4 on a 4GB IDE drive as a master, and then SuSE 8.1 on the slave 13GB drive.
To install suse 8.1, I downloaded the entire thing off the FTP and wrote it to a DVD.  The line in the BIOS is something like "boot hdc:/boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/fd0 initrd=/boot/initrd" as it was in the readme.  I have the loader stuff for MILO on the NT4 drive with the loaders for NT, so I can start MILO without any extra disks.

The first annoying this is the random "bad magic" with packages... sometimes an install will be useless and I'll have to start from scratch.

I have, through trial and error, come to a routine where I am able to install a functioning OS on the 13GB drive with the default partitioning as it gives you when you just run the install.  First partition is swap, second is the actual linux.

What I can't figure out is what to do next to get it to boot straight into linux from the hard drive.  I can boot the install DVD, then back out and tell it to "boot installed" and select hdb2 and away it will go.  Once a loonnnggg time ago I managed to boot from the hard drive from MILO by typing *something* I am not sure but I had renamed a bunch of stuff in linux like maybe I did initrd to vmlinuz.gz or something like that.  I've tried copying the vmlinuz in the boot folder to the root and renaming it a million ways, but if I put anything other than "hdb2:/" after boot, it just says a message like "path function is not directory" or BLEH.  If I type "boot hdb2:/" it spews out a buch of # signs like it's working, but then just says "not an ELF file" errrrrr.

If anyone knows a basic start-to-finish idiot-proof way to get this done, it would be a great help.  My method as it stands is:

Delete all partitions on the drive in the AlphaBIOS
Boot the DVD
Select the packages
Just go
*installs*

What do I do next?  Should I be choosing some kind of different partitioning?  Am I supposed to be running some weird function in linux?  Do I have to build something?  Argh!

JA
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