I have two hard drives both of which will boot fine (slackware 9.1) if they are plugged in on their own. But if I try to plug them both in together (one as master and the other as slave) then the boot hangs with "LILO timestamp mismatch".

This does not happen if I exchange the either hd with another hd
that is not slackware 9.1. There is something specific about this pair of hard drives - probably that they are both slackware 9.1.

Very strange and very frustrating after 3 hours of trying all the combinations of cable positions, cable selects, and boot setuop settings!

Does anyone have an idea about this?

Andrew

I've got the same problem. Using Mandrake 9.2. It probably has nothing to do with the distro. If you find out how to solve this, please(!) let me know.

I'm PRETTY SURE that you've put the disk that's supposed to be slave as master (and otherwise). if you dont want to change the pin thingies on your HD, you could reinstall LILO.

good luck

oh.. timestamp? just try reinstalling? since you can't enter your disks, you should just reconfigure using the slack cd.

I don't know what caused the timestamp problem. It wasn't the slave/master issue as someone mentioned; I worked in the past with the two disks in the machine with the same configuration. I took the advice of those who reccomended GRUB and lo and behold - they were right!

Reinstall lilo - tried it

changing the pin things - all the combiniations that you can imagine
(remember it works fine if I simply replace one of the problem disks with another disk).

So what is GRUB ?

I just got the same thing doing a slack 9.1 install. All i did was boot my /dev/hda3 with a rescue disk, then reboot and it all worked fine.
Perhaps I am simply lucky... :-)