Hi everyone,

I've installed Slackware 12 (2.6.21.5) on a PC104+ form factor SBC, running a VortexDX3 CPU.

When installing (off a pen drive) I wasn't able to boot the huge.smp kernel, it would hang after detecting 2 CPU's. So I booted up huge.s and was able to install using that, at least having something to try out, albeit with only one core being recognized at the moment.

I did have some difficulty installing LILO though, I initially tried "simple" method but that didn't work at all, so I then re-did the entire install and next time through I tried "simple" again, no go, and then I used "expert", running from within liloconfig (after exting install), and that got me something working.

When I boot up right now, my only choice is "Slack12", as I entered when I ran liloconfig. However, when I look in /etc/lilo.conf, there is no "Slack12" label there at all !, and the timeout behaviour I get (2 seconds) is not what's in /etc/lilo.conf, also, /etc/lilo.conf has a (non-existent) Windows entry, and also refers to a boot message that I never see.

So where is the lilo.conf file that I'm actually using ?

I would like to play around with lilo.conf and try to get the smp version loaded so I can make use of both VortexDX3 cores, but I'm leery of horsing around with /etc/lilo.conf as this doesn't seem to be the lilo.conf that's actually getting used ??

Sorry if I'm not explaining this very well, my first Slackware installation.

Thanks in advance for the help.

I'm guessing that you actually have LILO installed in two places: The Master Boot Record (MBR) of your hard drive, and the boot sector of your Linux partition. In that case, the former will take presedence.

Try this:The first command will write a standard Master Boot Record (without LILO) to the drive, and the second command just reinstalls LILO.

Just out of interest, why are you installing an ancient and unsupported version of Slackware?

in /etc/lilo.conf

lilo.conf lives in the /etc directory. It's a plain text file, so you can edit it as root. Look there to see what it has called your Slackware boot option.

Hi everyone,

Thank you very much for the help, having LILO installed in two places is what I thought too, but I didn't know where the other place might be !, thanks for the help.

I will give the below lilo commands a try, thank you very much, fingers crossed that my little SBC will still boot up afterwards, as you can tell, I'm a bit scared to muck around with lilo !

I'm using an old version of Slackware because I have some data acquisition software that's built around an older driver for the analog-to-digital converter, the ADC driver is only compatible with 2.6 kernel or older.

If I can get this all to work on a lower power Vortex or VortexDX3 board, maybe I can "upgrade" to newer version of Slackware and ADC driver, but then again, if Slack12 works, not sure there would be reason to do so ?

I have two working "receivers" running "real-time" Linux (3.2.2) on 650 MHz Celerons, I was hoping I could just clone the hard-drive of one of my existing receivers, and replicate what I have right now, but when I tried to boot the VortexDX3 off an external hard-drive containing a clone (done with Clonezilla), kernel panic. So, seems I have to start from scratch with installing the A-D driver, ntp, and all the rest of the "tweaks" for my setup.

The fellow who did this for me is unfortunately no longer able to help me, and I didn't get any documentation with his work, so now I'm left to try to stumble/crawl through !

lilo -M /dev/hda
lilo -v

SUCCESS !, the boot up behaviour is now consistent with what's in /etc/lilo.conf

Thank you very much ! Sorry I'm not sure how to mark this as solved.

Go to the top of any page in the thread and look for a button called thread tools. It opens a useful menu of options.

Glad we were able to help you.