This ones been asked plenty of time but I couldn't seen to find the answer I was looking for. I have a slackware 9.1 box with 2 hardrives hda, hdb. I put slackware on hdb and made hda my /home directory. Then I put lilo on the mbr. When I boot I get a message with some error. I forget exactly what it was.

I messed up the mbr before I put slackware on and it didn't straighten it out.

What should I do?
I'm at work right now so I can't post my lilo.conf file. I just want to get some ideas.

Please be as exact as possible. Not just something like "run fixmbr". I know how to do it with windows but I don't have it on that comptuer.

I didn't look at the active boot flag with fdisk, but I think the mbr is corrupted anyways. Can it be corrupted? What are someways the mbr can become corrupted? Can you tell me what info is in the mbr?

Thanks,
JP

boot flag is irrelevant (it's a windows thing).
You can boot your Slack with the Slack cd. After you boot, you can configure lilo. Remember you need to run 'lilo' to apply changes to lilo.conf. When you get to your pc, post your lilo.conf and the output of 'fdisk -l' here.

If the boot flag is irrelevant how does it know which mbr to boot from. I have the two HDs on the same chain.

I had a version of slack on hda. Now I'm trying to boot from the hdb HD.

I'm guessing that the mbr on hda still has lilo installed on it from before. How can I remove it?

I still haven' t been home so I can't post the lilo.conf file yet.

thanks,
JP

Shouldn't be a problem. I don't think you need to. A previous post told you how to boot from the Slackware CD so you could fix lilo.conf and reinstall the bootloader. You can install lilo into the MBR of the first drive and have lilo boot linux from the second drive. In fact, my main system does something very similar. My lilo.conf specifies "boot=/dev/sda". but the root filesystem is on /dev/sdc. Works like a charm.
That'd be interesting to see.

Cheers,
RT

i am having a similar problem here too, i am using 2 hdd's and installing slack 9.1 to hda. when i get to installing lilo it gives an error saying lilo can't be installed. i have a 32mb partition at hda1 from some other linux install, do i need to mount that as /boot/ at the begining of the install process? -do i even need this partition at all ? thanks

actually, the bootable partition flag is relavant, whatever you have lilo set to boot as default is the partition that gets flagged bootable.

The bios directly interacts with the mbr of a disk.

This is not just a windows thing, it goes for any OS usually.

I messed around with a bunch of stuff and I really don't think its an mbr problem anymore so I made a new post.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=167729

Thanks for the help