installed Slackware 14.0 followed the how to guide
and installed on a hard drive one partition and swap partition
using fdisk.
Made a usb boot disk during install and boot onto this
after install. Press enter then get the screen similar to this:

darkstar login:

Log into the new system as "root".

Welcome to Linux 2.6.33.4.

darkstar login: root
Last login: Tue May 18 15:36:23 2010 on tty3.

Linux 2.6.33.4.
You have new mail.

darkstar: ~#

run startx and get the desktop.
However when i leave the desktop and reboot with out the usb stick
plugged in i get a blank screen.
Can only access slackware with the usb boot stick plugged in booting
from it.

How can i resolve this
thankx in advance.

It seems like you chose to install LILO onto a USB instead of the MBR on the hard drive during the installation process. I think installing LILO to the MBR should do it.

Once you're in the system (booting into the system with your USB LILO), running:
should (as far as I know) install LILO to the MBR.

Note: I've never installed LILO onto a USB or floppy disk, so although I doubt it, I'm not sure if the USB has contents from /boot like the kernel image, initrd, etc. that you may need.

this is what is on usb disk

fl.txt
message.txt
syslinux.cfg
vmlinuz

Make sure your bios knows to boot from the drive you installed slack on as well. I don't know how many disks you have but your computer may be trying to boot from a disk with no boot info.

You should post your /etc/lilo.conf

There is a line where ? is the disk where the bootpartition resides. If ? = b (boot = /dev/sdb) then you've probably installed lilo to the MBR of your USB-device.

But I did an installation from USB (with the usbboot.img) several times and it lilo was always by default installed to the MBR of /dev/sda

Markus

Run and select MBR when asked should fix the problem