Installing Slackware 9.1
 

I have Mandrake 9 installed on my second harddrive (Win98 on the first) and now I want to install Slackware there instead. Do I have to remove Mandrake before or will that be done automatically?

No, you don't have to remove it. If you have a separate partition for /home and you'd like to keep data on it, note down the partition name (from /etc/fstab, for example) and tell Slack not to format it. You don't need to format Mandrake partitions, uninstall LILO and so on. Everything can be done from Slack installer.

Ah, thanks.
I'll start installing it now and probably will be back to ask more later.

Hm, when I get to cfdisk it shows my first harddrive. The one with Windows in it. How do I choose the second one with Mandrake?

cfdisk /dev/hdb

Ok, so I installed Slackware.
When I restarted my computer I got that Mandrake-thing where I can choose whether to start Linux, Windows, floppy or failsafe.
Nothing about Slackware. I thought I had formatted that harddrive but apparently I did something wrong.

So, should I try reinstalling it?
Does anyone have a clue what I did wrong?

No, don't reinstall. The thing is that Slack's LILO was not installed. It can be fixed. You need a boot floppy (or cd) to boot as rescue? Do you have one?

I have a boot floppy (and a cd). What should I do next?

Ok. Does the boot floppy boot your Slack correctly? Try it.

I get this "Welcome to Slackware Linux custom boot disk" (or something similar) message.
It says "boot:" and I'm supposed to write something there. I pressed enter so that it chose the default... er... thing.
There's a lot of text going by and finally I get "Welcome to Linux 2.4.22 (tty1)" and "darkstar login:", where I'm supposed to write something. But I can't. Nothing more happens.

I installed it all over again, this time with LILO but it still doesn't work. The Mandrake-thing appears and when I choose "linux" it tries to start Mandrake and fails.

When you get darkstart login: you should put in root and the root password you created.
Then you are logged into your slackware system as root.
If you installed X (which I assume you did since you had Mandrake) then you can startx, gdm, kdm or whatever.
If you want it to boot into X automatically, change the default runlevel in /etc/inittab to 4

where did you install lilo? mbr or bootsector?
actually post your /etc/lilo.conf

Slackware 9.1 CD2 is a live/rescue CD. You could try it.

With the slackware 9.0 CD, I used the following to 'rescue' my system:

* boot with the CD
* just press enter a few times until you're in the prompt
* type these commands:

since you tell lilo where to find the kernel image, and root device, you could add mandrake to the slackware lilo menu too ;)

acjt: I cant do anything at all when I get to darkstar login.


Demonbane: To tell you the truth, I have no idea. And I don't think I know how to find out.


yapp: I did what you said. When I got to the prompt I tried typing in what you wrote.

mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb/disk (I assumed that "hd.." wasn't what I should type) and some text appeared. I tried chroot /disk and got "No such file or directory". I tried lilo and got "No such file or directory".