I have been using Slack for a few days, then tried out RH9 to see the differences. However, now I've switched back to Slack it doesn't seem to install properly.

My first problem is LILO no longer shows up, the install defaults to GRUB. But now GRUB is hanging at boot, just showing the following:

Verifying DMI Pool Data .............
Boot from CD :
GRUB

The only way I can get the system to boot is to put Slack disk 1 in and boot from it. At the first prompt I type:

bare.i root=/dev/hda2 noinitrd ro

After that everything boots up perfectly. I've tried (using cfdisk) deleting all partitions, writing that to disk, and then creating them all again, but no difference. I've tried every combination I can think of for file formats, no change. I've done slow formats on each partition, no luck. I've even reburnt my Slack disks, incase there was a scratch I couldn't see, but still nothing.

Can anyone help, I'm at a loss as what to try next.

Thanks

It sounds like LILO's not getting reinstalled. If you have Slackware installed already, next time you boot it up with the boot disk, type pkgtool at the prompt.

In there go to setup and scroll down to liloconfig. Press space to select it and hit return for OK. After that, just go through like normal and make sure it gets installed. It has to be installed to the MBR on the main hard drive if you want it to work every time your computer boots up.

Alternatively, you can check to make sure your /etc/lilo.conf is correct. Make sure the line "boot = /dev/hda" points to the drive your computer boots from, not the one Slackware is installed on. If it's correct, or if you changed it, type lilo at the terminal to reinstall it. LILO has to be reinstalled every time the configuration file is changed before those changes will take effect.

Thanks for the help Brane Ded, but neither worked. Lilo seems to be there, as all the files are present, but the boot is still getting stopped at GRUB. Would a bad grub.conf file (if such a thing exists) cause it to hang, or do you think it's more serious, like a corrupted GRUB install (can't think 5 installs would have gone wrong)?

I've made some progress. If I enter the following after booting from the CD:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

then apparently this wipes the boot record (writes zeros over it). This has finally got rid of GRUB, but now I'm left with a system that hangs at:

Verifying DMI Pool Data .............
Boot from CD :


The BIOS is set to try the HDD after a CD boot failure, but nothing. Is it possible that LILO isn't getting called, and if so how do I force it to run?

Boot into Slack (I'm guessing you have a way to do that such as a boot floppy or CD since you talked about checking for the presence of lilo) and if /etc/lilo.conf has the line 'boot = /dev/hda' and your bootable hard drive is the primary device on the first IDE channel then as root type, '/sbin/lilo' which will force lilo to re-read it's configuration file and write itself to the hard drive's boot sector again.

Thanks Darin, as you've probably guessed from the other posting, I've solved it. Still it's making me question the power of cfdisk.

You'd have a fun time trying to partition your disk with dd.