Booting from Flash Card emits LILO error L 01 01 01 01 01...

Okay, so I can successfully install linux on a flash card and upon booting everything is flawless. BUT, if I try to repeat the process (which I will describe below) then when I reboot lilo will emit the infamous L 01 01 01 01 01 01 ... error.

I have tried everything I could possibly think of but for whatever reason, I require a brand spankin' new flash card for it to work. Once I've performed the first "burn", I can't repeat it.

Here are the details for building the flash card (target) on a host machine:

1. fdisk /dev/hda in the fdisk program, all existing partitions are deleted and a new primary partition is created at partition 1. the default start cylinder (1) is used. the default end cylinder (in my case, 499) is used. the partition is made bootable. the results are written to the flash.

1. ext2 filesystem is created on the partition
2. mount /dev/hda1 /mnt
3. files are copied over.
4. unmounted.
5. remove the flash card and install in target system.
6. boot target machine. all is well.

repeat this process and then the aforementioned error is emitted.

what is going on? I have tried numerous things, like fussing with the lilo.conf file. i've tried dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1

yes, it's very strange: according to the LILO documentation the error code 0x01 is as follows:

Illegal Command: This shouldn't happen, but if it does, it may indicate

an attempt to access a disk which is not supported by the BIOS.

So I'm thinking that somehow the disk geometry is getting corrupted. I dunno.