New install trashed system!
 

Hi all,

I was nearly finished installing Slackware 12.2 on my main laptop (Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo) when the installer asked me if I wanted to install LILO. Although I prefer Grub, for the sake of simplicity I said 'yes' and let it get on with it. Unfortuantely, half an hour later it was still on the same screen, so it was clear something was wrong. After all, installing a boot loader should take the blink of an eye to complete.

I feared I might have to do a hard reset, but the problem APPEARED to disappear just by hitting Return and the remains of the installation seemed to go through fine. At the end, the installer said the usual 'remove the DVD and reboot into the new system' so I did. Unfortunately, however all I got was a message from the previously installed Grub giving error no.15.

At this point I thought I'd best just slip in a live CD and take look at the partitions with 'fdisk -l' but it reported nothing! Zilch, nada. I've never had that happen before! I then rebooted with PMagic which scanned the hard drive and all appeared normal in PM's gui. The Slackware install seemed have gone in with 5.5Gb of that partition used and the sizes of the partitions as shown looked the same as I would have expected.

I then tried a 'grub-install hd0' with a Knoppix live CD and got: 'Could not find device for /boot: Not found or not a block device.' So I thought I'd run 'gpart /dev/sda' to see if the partitions were okay, but I got a 'fatal error: no such file or directory.'

I'm stumped for a solution or for what to try next. Any suggestions?

No takers yet, eh?
Well I went on to try a boot manager program off the Ultimate Boot CD and it has successfully got the first partition up and running (thankfully, as that was the one with the most valuable data on it) so whatever the problem is, at least it must be repairable!

You can run your Slackware DVD as a rescue disc.Follow the instructions and once up and running run /sbin/lilo.Hopefully this will fix things.

I never got the option, I'm afraid.
However, I have fixed the problem using a non-nerd line of attack against it. I opened the disk up with PMagic and shrank the Slackware partition down to half its size. With the unallocated space thereby freed-up, I created another ext3 partition on which I then installed Ubuntu. When I re-booted, I had a fully-working Grub and all three installations were fully bootable. Having got the system integrity back, I'll now merge the Slackware and Ubuntu partitions and install PClinuxOS in their place as it's the only distro to my knowledge that works great straight out-of-the-box without having to spend hours and hours and hours getting odd bits of hardware working. Some day maybe ALL Linux distros will be as good as PClinuxOS in this respect.