Right, I understood that part (believe it or not) but IS that the MOST CORRECT or should I be using a different one?

If it IS the correct one why would I be getting that wierd error?

Thanks.

first of all you might try searching this forum for your problem. I think I've seen it in here before. If the 99 99 or whatever appears before it says decompressing kernel .. .... or whatever it says then it's probably your bootloader that is causing the problem not the kernel. the bare.i kernel seems to work with almost all configurations. Unless you have scsi hard drives or something like that.

soup

Hey Soup,

Us newbies have to stick together eh? Thanks for the reminder to search, I have not the SLIGHTEST idea why it didn't occur to me but hey...

I was just going through documentation on the install when I read that you had to WRITE the cfdisk info and while I did it the FIRST tiem I installed (way back when everything was working...just wanted to practice...oops!) and for the last few times I didn't so that would explain a heck of a lot don'cha think?

I will post back if this works as I suspect it will. Thanks all.

Try this. you have your windows install, so don't mess with it, because windows sucks.

Install LILO to the boot sector of your boot partition. NOT THE MBR!

then, get out a clean floppy, formatted for dos/vfat, and do this.


mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /floppy
dd if=/dev/hdXX of=/floppy/boot.lnx bs=512 count=1

#replace hdXX with whatever device your boot partition is.

#make sure that your floppy has the file on it.

ls /floppy

#then reboot (gently)

shutdown -r now

boot into windows, and copy your boot.lnx into C:\

then, get into System on the control panel, Advanced tab, and manually edit your boot.ini file (usually located in C:\)

add this line:
C:\boot.lnx="Slackware 9.0"
or whatever you want the menu item to read.

if you want linux to load by default, change the default= line to:
default=C:\boot.lnx

for many, this is probably doing it the hard way. but Windows has never yelled at me about the MBR being corrupt, NTLDR being missing, or any of that other garbage i've run into with LILO on the MBR of a windows machine.

major drawback: you have to do this EVERY TIME you make changes to lilo.conf and run lilo, or if you change the kernel. But, like i said, it works for me.


If this helps, GREAT! Thanks for listening!

I must first thank you all for you suggestions.

That said, I tried something on my own while waiting...(not the most patient of folks) What I tried was this:

I booted on the floppy and then ran liloconfig (got that idea from the slackware forum) and then THIS time I told it to write to the MBR! in all my previous installs I had been having it write to root and thought nothing of it (the first two installs worked fine) but this since the system was giving me such heartburn and most of the post I had read in different threads kept saying MBR I decided to try it. Lo and behold...VOILA! It started just fine! I was SO proud of myself, then I moved on and am trying to install the imlib so I can install icewm and not having the greatest success ...so the excitement was short lived. but thanks again all!

(I wasn't kidding on my sig line!)