I installed slack but had to reinstall it because i accidentally deleted the wrong partition, No matter what i do the old lilo keeps booting the old installation with a kernel panic. I already repartitioned and formatted with linux fdisk but it keeps booting the old one. How can i format the drive completely and start from scratch. Ive tried to format with DOS but that does not work either. I know what your thinking, if I formatted it then Nothing should be booting but it is. I dont know what is going on. Its not an old system and the drive is good.

To start completely from scratch (that is, to get rid of LILO and reinstall it from your Slack installation CD), you must wipe the MBR. Fdisk should be able to do this. You can also install a new version of LILO over the old one in the MBR - something the Slackware installation CD could do.

If you successfully deleted your old boot partition, there is no way you can be booting off of it. It is possible that you deleted the original partition, but then created a new partition with the same starting block - in which case the old partition could still be there. Try deleting all partitions and using the Slack isntallation CD to repartition the HD...
OR
...mount the old partition (which we agree shouldn't exist) with a bootdisk and "rm -f all". This should effectively destroy all inodes on the old filesystem and render the partition un-bootable. (if you are anal-retentive, you can use shread)...
OR
Zero the entire hard drive with "dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda bs=1024k".

One of these should work. Good luck!

Thanks ill give some of that a try, in the meantime i tried to install Peanut linux which installed fine but when i rebooted it booted just like the slack install did whith the same error so i think i have to wipe out the MBR, I thought i did that in linux fdisk, im sure i did. I dont know why this is still hppening Ill post a follow up. Thanks.

I just did both of what you recomended and Lilo is still booting and I am still getting the the kernel panic message . What else can i do ??
when i did the second thing it said 00 in 00 out. I tried to mount the partition but it dosnt work. I issured the rm command line and it seemed like it worked cuz i got no error message.

boot with a linux cd/floppy and run lilo -u
if that dosen't work, boot with the cd or floppy ond try
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1

UH.... I think i got rid of Lilo but now my system locks up at verifying DMI pool data. UHH.... does this mean my bios is bad? it has never done this before.?? Except when i have the slack boot disk in the drive and i have cdrom boot enabled it will boot from the cd.

let me make sure i understand.

It locks up during the bios boot before it gets to lilo now?
If so try loading failsafe parameters in your bios setup. It should be listed as an option along with save and exit.

With the CD in the drive and Booting from the CD enabled in the bios it does or doesn't boot?

yes, I did load failsafe bios, It was locking up at bios but that had to have been something with the partitioning, I know what your gonna say it cant but after i issued the command line to blank the disk thats when it did it, then it would only boot from CD. After that I repartitioned and reinstalled Lilo and Slack. Now it boots from the hard drive and slack boots but with a few problems. My mouse dosnt work, got cursor but it dosnt move and when i issue Startx it takes 20 seconds to load KDE. any ideas? Thanks for the help.. everyone.

Must have hosed the partition table beyond recognition glad you got that bit sorted.

Make sure the mouse is defined correctly in the /etc/X11/XF86Config. The section for pointing devices is a pretty easy read, all should make sense.

the slow load of X could be mouse related, try to get it working before you go chasing after another problem. Best bet it to read the /var/log/XFree86.log to see if any errors get spit out that are helpful.

If you have gpm installed, you can use it to see if the mouse is working without going into X; this could save time figuring out whether or not there is a problem with the XFree86 config.
OR
Run "cat /dev/psaux" where /dev/psaux is the path to your mouse device. If the mouse works, you should see funny characters on your screen when you move the mouse. If you don't get funny characters, try a different device. Once you have the correct device, you can simlink it to wherever XFree looks for the mouse (i.e. ls -s /dev/wherever/my/mouse/is /dev/psaux) or you can modify the XFree config to point to the correct device.

(Press Ctrl + c to get out of "cat /dev/psaux")

If the mouse works with gpm or cat and XFree has the right device in its config, try changing the protocol from "PS/2" to "IMPS/2", especially if you have a three button scroll mouse.

Good luck!

I changed the mouse in the XF86Config to IMPS/2 and that did not work so i changed it to auto and now the GUI starts up a lot faster but my mouse still does not work, I just checked to make sure its plugged in, LOL Im gonna horse around with XF86Config file some more, yup I just made a backup.
Anyone know how to navigate the menu in KDE with keyboard then all i would have to do is change around the mouse there?
Oh yea one more thing. In my FR86Config my mouse identifier is shown as mouse1 and all the other examples ive seen say mouse0, so i changed it to 0 and X locked up so i changed it back to 1

Did you test to see if the mouse works outside of X (i.e. with cat or gpm)?

To navigate KDE menus by keyboard, press Alt+F1

mouse0 is the correct identifier for your mouse. Is a mouse0 defined elsewhere in the X config? It ought not to be defined twice.

I have a Logitech optical USB mouse with a scroll wheel. The appropriate portion of my XF86Conig looks like this:

If you don't have a scroll wheel, just leave off the last option (the one with ZAxisMapping).