Hello again, Sorry for not posting back earlier but I have had some real life to deal with.

Anyway, I found out that mkinitrd accepts a UUID in the -r parameter so I tried creating an initrd with a UUID in the -r parameter to mkinitrd and using a generic kernel.
I also had UUIDs in my lilo.conf for "root = " and UUIDs in my fstab. I used a /dev/disk/by-id in the "boot = " part of lilo.conf but lilo didn't like it so I went back to using /dev/sdf for the "boot = ". What else can I use ?
But the boot failed. Error message is something about not being able to mount on /mnt.

Do I need to do something special in the mkinitrd / initrd-tree ?

I can't be the only person with this problem can I ?

So how about a step by step guide to solving this ?

The only other distro that I had this problem with is Fedora Core 16 (listing /dev/sdf as the first hard disk). So how do all of the other distros get the first hard disk to be /dev/sda but Slackware (and Fedora) can't ?

knowing the exact error should help some, but it might be possible that you used uuid for disk where you wanted partition, or uuid for partition where you wanted disk... dunno, mine works as is, so, there must be something odd going on. worse, i may have mixed up which to use, esperimenz.

I once had Fedora and Blag on a box Fedora was on drive sda and Blag was on sdb,well if they were both plugged in then whichever system you would boot would boot ok but there were errors,by removing one of them the other would boot ok...so init was taking files from the wrong system even though it was on another drive...easy to see why when all that's between them is rules that can easily be circumvented.

I would remove all extraneous USB stuff and hide the other partitions,make it seem like an install to a single drive and see if that gets you started in the right direction.


nb naming devices begins in the BIOS.

One question I have is, What is your hardware? (Desktop/laptop, mobo, cards, etc.)
I ask because I have an old Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop that had the hard drive and CD-ROM drive reversed. Under Slack 12.2 CD drive was /dev/hda and the hard drive was /dev/hdc - why no /dev/hdb is still unknown. Under 13.x they were in their proper order, though.

Hi, sorry again for the delay in replying.
Firstly, my hardware (as requested by the last poster):
Abit IN9-MAX-32X motherboard (with core 2 duo CPU), Creative Audigy soundcard, Gigabyte (NVIDIA) GTX560 TI graphics card, Technotrend satellite receiver card.
3 Samsung spinpoint SATA Hard Disks, SATA LG Blu-Ray re-writer, a memory card reader/writer and the normal floppy disk and usb and firewire ports.
Secondly, how to fix this problem :
First get a copy of KNOPPIX 6.0.1. I found one to download from this site http://www.pcworld.pl/ftp/linux_2765/Knoppix.601.html (using Google translate as it is in Polish).
The download button is labelled "Pobierz". Then burn it to a CD and boot from it. This linux kernel will show the hard (fixed) disks before the removable disks
(i.e hard disks listed starting from sda) and will be able to read and write ext4 filesystems. Then do the following as root
(this is what I did - my root partition is ext4 on partition sda3 and I have a boot partition on sda1) :
Then (after you have changed /etc/lilo to point to your /dev/sda (or whatever disk you want) partitions) and specified the generic kernel in the new lilo.conf you can then run /sbin/lilo successfully.
Then you can re-boot.
The first time that I rebooted I got an error message that it could not mount the root filesystem so I had to do a "mount /dev/sda3 /mnt -o ro" at the prompt given.
This will then boot into your slackware linux using /dev/sda.
After I had done all this I checked the /boot/initrd-tree/dev directory and found that the reason for the boot up error message was that this directory still had the devices for the disks sdf, sdg and sdh and their partitions.
So I ran a new mkinitrd_command_generator.sh (in /usr/share/mkinitrd) and that corrected the problem (you may/should be able to run this command in your chroot when you have booted into KNOPPIX but I haven't tested that).
It is important that you use the generic kernel. I found that the generic kernel (with an initrd in my case) will work with the fist hard disk as /dev/sda but the huge kernel will not.
So this problem is now fixed. But I have a question - Why does the huge kernel list removable devices first but the generic kernel lists fixed disks first ?

I would hazard a guess and say it's because the initrd doesn't have usb storage modules in it, only fixed disk.