LILO BIOS Check
 

I have Slackware 10.1 (kernel 2.6.12.2) running on my IBM Thinkpad T42 and for some reason the LILO BIOS Data Check takes forever to complete. On my desktop computer, it takes about 1 second to complete. My Thinkpad takes at least 15 seconds to complete. Can I disable this check or is there anything that I can do to speed this up a bit? Thanks for any help.

hmmmm what you mean by "LILO BIOS data check" ? As far as I know, LILO doesn't care about the BIOS, unless it does some check that I am not aware of...
Can you give some more details?

Right when you pick a distribution other than Windows, it says at the bottom of the screen "Bios Data Check." When it;s done it says Complete and then starts to load the kernel.

Oh, sorry for the confusion... Still this check isn't done by Lilo atmo, as the kernel is already loaded in memory at this point (I think?)

Hmmm I never had problem with this. In newer kernel, there is some options that make some "check" to the BIOS, like, in "Processor in feature" the "Firmware drivers/BIOS enhanced drive call..." or in "Plug and Play" the option "Plug and Play BIOS support".
My guess would be to turn off these 2 options, but I don't really know if these have something to do with the "BIOS check".

Sorry, I got the process wrong, it goes like this:
I checked on my desktop and those two lines are diabled as well as on my laptop. Also, my desktop doesn't produce as many dots during the Loading process.

the "dots" are the kernel that is tranfered in high memory (RAM). Sometime it can take more time, as example if you are booting from a floppy, as floppy are REALLY slow...

If you see more dots, this only mean your system transfer rate from harddrive to memory is really slow, maybe a dying hdd or just a very old IDE bus that transfert really slowly... What kind of laptop is this?

1.7 GHz Pentium M Dothan
512 MB RAM

I am booting from the hard disk which has an RPM of 7200.

I have the same problem here!
I have an HP-Compaq nx9005 notebook, and it is lilo! I always install grub because of this problem.

I think that happens when the kernel is uncompressing to memory. Here are my observations:

1) Lilo passes this step almost instantly on desktop machines. I installed Slackware on 2 notebook machines, both booted so slow. 4 desktops have no problems.
2) Grub handles this. I don't know how, but Grub never waits.

Why do I not switch to Grub this time? Because I want to solve this! :)

I quick google found this:
Lilo has a option to skip this test.
By entering nobd as a boot-argument, or by setting the global flag 'suppress-boot-time-BIOS-data' in
lilo.conf

http://www.wlug.org.nz/lilo(8)

Solved!
 

I'm sorry for posting this too late, but I solved the problem just an hour later than my previous reply.
I read lilo.conf manual more carefully(i.e. using my brain instead of another part of my body :) ) and found the answer there.
Just add the following in /etc/lilo.conf, under Global section:

Like this:
The file goes on of course, this is just the portion you need.
Note: Maybe you will need to do as root. I did it anyway, because I recompiled my kernel at the same time.

Im on ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 and adding compact worked for me. Lilo was showing the dots and taking 10 seconds even though I'm running of a 15k rpm drive.