Hey everyone,

I'm having trouble booting Linux. It was working just last night. This morning, I decided that I would move my MP3's to my Linux drive. So I used Partition Magic to shrink my D drive NTFS partition, my /usr/local ext3 partition, and to enlarge my /home ext3 partition. Here's how they go from Partition Magic.

Primary Partitions:
G drive - FAT - 47 MB for BootMagic
C drive - NTFS - 9216.9 MB for Windows XP
Linux Drive - ext3 - 3074.9 MB for Linux booting and main stuff
Extended Partition

Logical Partitions:
Linux Swap - 203.9 MB
/home - ext3 - 6228.3 MB
/usr/local - ext3 - 1027.6 MB for now
F drive - FAT32 - 1027.6 MB for shared data
D drive - NTFS - 7789.3 MB for my stuff

That's what I turned it into anyway. Before, everything was the same except that the /home partition was 1 GB, the /usr/local partition was 3 GB, and the D drive was bigger. The problem is that, once I did these minor partition changes, while not touching the main ext3 partition or the swap, I could not boot into Linux anymore. I would choose "Slackware Linux" from my BootMagic window and it would give me:

L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99

I wonder if there is anything I could do to fix this because I don't really want to reinstall if I don't have to. It DID take me quite a while to get ALSA working the first time...

Boot Linux with the cd, then rerun lilo.

I ran lilo first to change the active partition to hda4 since that's where my Linux is installed. I ran it again using the lilo.conf off my mounted hda4, but I got the following error.

Fatal: Sorry, don't know how to handle device 0x0100

This may very well be because I'm not familiar with running lilo

Maybe your partitions changed. Run 'fdisk -l' to see them. The cd can boot a current installation, I think the instructions pop up when it boots 9or when you press F2 or some thing).

the boot disk i use is slackware 9.1 disk 2, which has a running kernel on it. it boots into my memory as a ramdisk, and from there i need to mount my actual harddisk partition. i checked fdisk and my partitions are still the same. as i said, i just resized a couple of them. what is device 0x0100? is it memory?

Disk 1 can boot your current installation. Somewhere you'll find instructions forthis. You add the 'noinitrd root=/dev/hd<your lin part>', and it boots your current system. For the device, there is the howto on that at www.tldp.org that may help.

i got it going with lilo. the only thing that i wasn't doing was the -r option after i mounted my hda4. i mounted it as /hd4 and it did everything properly once i entered "lilo -r /hd4"
thanks a lot for your help!