I have a system which is failing to boot a new installation of Slackware 12. I'm using lilo.

/dev/hda1 old linux root partition (Slack 11)
/dev/hda2 swap
/dev/hda3 new linux root partition (Slack 12)

Boots using LILO with /dev/hda1 just fine.

Boots using LILO with root=/dev/hda3 and hangs at "freeing unused memory"

It appears to be the new kernel which is having the problem loading, but I can load the same kernel from a DVD OK.

Searching, I find that this could be swap, initrd, and other things. So far I haven't found a solution.

I'm open for pointers.

Please post the output of:
fdisk -l
df -hT
cat /etc/lilo.conf

If you don't give the add'l info. we ask for, we can't help.

This turned out to be a hardware problem. I had a disk which was bad, even though diagnostics told me it was OK. I imaged it to another drive, and everything worked OK. Thanks.