A new installation on a new 500 GB drive, on a primary partition. I get a clean installation of lilo on my second drive /dev/sdb on the root partition. When I boot I get a flashing cursor on a black screen. I have partitioned the drive several times using different methods, sector boundary and cylinder boundary. I can boot into Slackware from the generated USB stick boot but not when I boot the hard drive. I have the same problem with another distro, so I am inclined to believe it is a hardware glitch. But the drive checks out in all tests I have tried, including changing partition size with GParted to rewrite the partition table. I believe the problem lies with the partition table. Something tells me Seagate has cut corners on this model and the addressing of the drive is not normal.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Make a Knoppix CD/DVD and boot on this to check if it's anything wrong with the hard drive or other HW.

Hi,
Boot the Slackware Install disk then do a 'fdisk -l'. What do you see?
You are using 'MBR' on the primary drive as your bootloader to chainload the new install?

When you boot with the 'USB', what do you see with 'fdisk -l'? Plus, please attach copies of your 'lilo.conf' file(s).

Also check the bios setup. Some motherboards (an old Intel BTX one in my case) allow you to choose in the bios setup among the individual detected hard disks as the primary boot device. In moving from grub 0.97 to Lilo, this was the only way I could get Lilo to boot a Slack 13.37 installation on /dev/sdc on the above-mentioned Intel board.

depending the age/style of BIOS, you will
1. need to boot from MBR and not superblock, or
2. you are not booting from the 1st drive (ie sda and see also croxen's post), or
3. you forgot to set the partition "boot" flag

You can also make a live disc with Salix:

http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.php/Home

Better yet, if you suspect drive hardware issues is to put this on a USB drive:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php