Hello all, first timer at slackware so hopefully I will not annoy too many people. Anyway a little backgroud to my problem might help, I'm installing slackware 10.1 (I have CD 1 and 2 ) on to my laptop. I can get through the setup menu fine but when I exit the setup menu and reboot the system (no CD in the tray) I get a grub 17 error. Any help on this problem would be great because I'm looking forward to getting the OS working right.


P.S. I'm following the online book at the slackware site. Thank You

It appears (from googling) that Grub does not recognize the filesystem (this has been reported in bugzilla). Here is one solution from the Gentoo forums used as a workaround.

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(by eck)

the partition types on all of my linux partitions (except the swap partition) were somehow changed from 0x83 to 0x93. This was easily fixed by changing the values back to 0x83 using fdisk, and now I can boot Gentoo fine. This seems to be a bug in GRUB, and I'll file a bug report tonight.

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Another suggestion/solution is/was to reinstall Grub


Hope this is of some help.

Did you install grub after the slackware install or it was previously installed ?

To tell you the truth now that I think of it I thought I did the simple install of LILO, and if I'm not mistaken aren't LILO and grub both boot loaders?

lilo and grub are both bootloaders...but if you installed lilo, you wouldn't be getting grub errors...so somewhere along the way, grub got (or almost got?) installed. grab the grub from the slackware and try installing it...it's the version i use, with no problems...

Ok should i go through another install and DO NOT use LILO, or is there a way to salvage the system instead of going through another install? Thanks

Yes, basically Slackware is installed, it's just that Grub is not configured to load it.
I've never used Grub so I can't help you there.

If you want to use lilo, just boot with the CD 1 of Slackware, mount your harddisk, chroot to it, run liloconfig and install it to the MBR, that will overwrite Grub.
To do that issue the following commands:
Replace hdXX with the device where Slackware is.

Ok I did what you said and now I'm getting a "installing a linux loader" message. Also for the LILO options I choose simple install is this alright? Before I forget when I was doing the commands you mentioned I was getting feedback saying could not mount /prc/partions is this going to mess everything up since it cannot load the partions correctly? Thank You

Does anyone knon if there any commnds I can run to check if LILO is hanging on me, because it has been installing the kernel for the last 5 hours now. Thanks

You could use top to check if it's doing something, but it likely hanged up by that time, it usually takes some seconds.
I usually don't recommend this, but you my want to try reinstalling Slackware and choosing to install LILO to MBR that time.

Thanks to everyone who helped me out. I got lilo to work this time, I went with the MBR option. Thanks Everyone