Ok. Just helped my younger brother install Slackware and now he has a problem. I have done like 20 Slack installs and never had an issue. I even installed here to a new partition so I could walk him through step by step over the phone.

What happens is, we get through the entire install, using 'expert' during lilo, everything appears fine. Reboot when prompted, and wind up with a black screen with a capital L inthe upper left corner with a blinking cursor. Nothing happens after this.

We performed a reinstall. Same thing. Then I had him boot from the Slackware Live cd, mount the slack parition, chroot over to it, and do /sbin/lilo to try reinstalling lilo. It appeared to work (no errors), but then after reboot we get the same black screen the the L. No lilo menu, nothing.

Anyone have a clue what to do here?

from the Lilo readme. what kinda HDD does he have?

I don't understand your question. Where is the lilo readme? And by HDD you mean?
His device is a Maxtor IDE, and it's HDA. Same 160gb as I have matter of fact.

Also, there is no <error>, just an L.

All I can think of, is the install media is corrupt somehow or another. He has a completely vanilla Hewlitt Packard with an Intel 815 chipset, integrated graphices, etc. I owned one some time ago and had no problems installing any linux distro. Problem is, he is 700 miles away and now has no access to Windows or Linux so obviosly, no internet access to download any kind of helpful utilities OR an new Slackware cd set.

Update: I had him do fdisk /mbr, so now he is at least able to boot to windows.

HDD stands for Hard Disc Drive and you already answered the question

Anyway, the error message is that there's nothing beyond that L and that is what I wanted to tell you. I'm hardly being an expert on this field that's why I only posted that part of the readme which is accessable at /usr/doc/lilo-<insert his versionnumber here>/README

You can BTW boot your system with mount root=/dev/hdxy (change the numbers according to your setup) at the boot prompt of the installation disk.

How old is his BIOS. Does he maybe have this issue because the linux partition lies beyond the 1024 cylinders? Maybe a BIOS upgrade helps.

160GB on an older board seems to be the trouble here but I'm afraid, I can't help any further.

Oh and have you tried installing Lilo in the superblock of the linux partition rather than the MBR? then of course the Linux partition has to be the active partition and in Lilo you can tell the PC to boot Windows (9x or ME it appears)

I am almost positive his BIOS is ok with the 160gb drive. He's been using it for awhile, though it could be under some Windows software emulation this, rather than the BIOS. What we ultimately decided, is for me to mail him a copy of the Slack cd's I purchased from Slackware so we can at least rule out corrupt cd's. He fooled around with some retarded md5 check util in Windows that never really accomplised anything, so...

could be the vga option in lilo, i know that screwed my installation up

that usually crashes the PC after LILO has been loaded and told which Kernel to load not before LILO actually starts.

i mean the boot screen option and i only got the "l" til i made it use the default mode