L01 01 01 01........
 

It was fine till yesterday, my Slackware used to boot normally. But today I don't know what happened, when I power on my PC it starts to print L01 01 01 01......and continues for about 15 minutes and then only Slackware boots.


How to boot it fast? It would be a great help.

Those lines say that somethings wrong with your bootloader "lilo". Look here and see how it compiles to your specific problem.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/a1483.html

May be corrupt disk
 

I re-installed Slackware in the disk. Same problem happened.
Then I thought of checking the disk by installing windows there, I tried that. During the process of installing Windows, PC restarts a lot.
When my PC restarted for first time it displayed the "disk read error" messege. I tried it again, same situation happened.

Is it the fault of my hard drive, so that Lilo is showing L 01 error?

check if making changes in grub.conf works or not...reducing time in grub.conf might resolve this issue

Grub???
 

Hello Manish, Lilo is the default boot loader for Slackware. I don't think that Grub is inbuilt in Slackware. I tried editing Lilo for many times, it boots normally for first time after making change in Lilo file, but same case happens after that.

I suspect a failing hard disk. The LILO first stage bootloader is getting an "invalid disk command" BIOS return value. I would backup any important data to alternative media immediately. Do 'smartctl -H /dev/sda' or 'smartctl -a /dev/sda' report any problems?

slackware as well has the grub loader ready as a package. Should be somewhere under the alternative directory on the install medium.
Beside that Iwoulddefinitetly make a backup as already sggested. It does not hurt and makes your more adventureoustrying out thinks.

GRUB And Backup
 

Oh, if that is the case then I'll try to install GRUB from disk. And thanks for the suggestion to backup my data.

I know this problem ( not very well :) ), a friend of mine had the same problem with grub which kept printing ( GRUB GRUB .... ).

I think your hard disk is clean, the problem is with your MBR ( something messed it up ).

You should backup your data first and re-install LILO ( I'm not sure that will fix it ).


What I did with my friend is to re-partition which has fixed it ( his hard disk is 7 years old now :) ).

I hope that will help.

J.A.X

Try Ultimate Boot CD, they have great partitioning application, a command line application that can give you option to access your MBR.

An option I don't know how to access uisng fdisk :).