I'm kind of a linux newbie myself; but let me ask a (dumb) question. I noticed you had a windows drive and a linux drive. Which drive's mbr did you install the bootloader to? I know windows (especially xp) is very picky about the mbr, and that sounds like it could be your problem... Just a thought.

lilo was installed to the MBR of /dev/hda (the Windows drive)

I'm sorry man, I don't see anything wrong. Even the LILO output from your command looked normal. People who have their linux on a non-primary drive get that warning and it's no problem as far as I can tell from searching the posts. The last thing if you haven't done it is to change the BIOS order to boot from hda first.

If this doesn't work, my advice to you is to send a pm to Saikee. That guy is the undisputed heavyweight booting champion of the world. He boots over 100 distros with I don't remember how many drives on one PC. If he can't spot the problem and fix it then you may as well sell your PC

In answering your question, if you installed LILO previously to the superblock I don't know if a reformat with reiserfs, etc. wipes this out. I should know this, but I can't think at the moment. If it was still there, you could boot your linux as a chainloader entry like winbloze.

Right now can you boot anything?

From the time you power your system on, exactly what do you see? I just thought of something but I think if it was true Lilo would have given an error message. Do you have some kind of anti-virus in your BIOS that prevents updating the MBR? If you see a setting like that, turn it off and run Lilo again.

After installation, Winbloze doesn't know or care anything about the MBR. The problem with Winbloze is that when you install it, it will unilaterally update the MBR and toast any other bootloader you have installed. This is why when planning a multiboot with winbloze it's best to install winbloze first and then your other distros.

Even if you don't do things in that order, it's not a problem if you understand Lilo/Grub, whatever you're using. You can restore an unbootable system in a couple of minutes with a Linux Live CD using Lilo.

I can't boot anything from the hard drives, without inserting the XP Rescue CD.
In order to get to LILO, I have to use my Windows XP Disk.
Still doesn't make sense to me.
The BIOS will say "Boot from CD:" and then as it goes "............" one dot at a time, I don't do anything until it times out, so as to NOT boot it from the CD, so it DOESN'T boot from the CD, it starts LILO and then things run smoothly from there.

I wish I could see what the BIOS was doing during bootup, because then i could figure out how it's getting LILO to load ONLY if the Windows CD is in the drive.

As partially stated above, I see the BIOS, Device List, IRQ settings and the like, no error messages, and then, when it should be firing up LILO, the "Boot from CD:" prompt.
At this point, 1 of 2 things happens:
If I have the Windows XP Rescue CD inserted, once the "Boot from CD" prompt times out, LILO boots and all is well.
If, however, there is no CD in the drive, once the "Boot from CD" prompt times out, a new line is printed just below the "Boot from CD" prompt saying (to paraphrase) "DISK BOOT FAILURE, PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK..." and the computer won't budge another inch until i insert the Windows XP Rescue CD.

It sounds to me like the BIOS just has the wrong boot order and everything is actually ok with your installation. Did you set BIOS to boot from hda?

If the BIOS is set wrong like I think it is, it explains why you need a CD- you have boot from CD first, which is wrong. You have to have hda first. If Lilo wasn't installed properly on hda then you wouldn't be able to boot- so everything but your BIOS is ok. It is certainly not finding lilo on your winbloze CD

> The BIOS will say "Boot from CD:" and then as it goes "............" one dot
> at a time, I don't do anything until it times out, so as to NOT boot it from
> the CD, so it DOESN'T boot from the CD, it starts LILO and then things run
> smoothly from there.

It makes perfect sense to me- it's doing what you told it. You said before you had BIOS set to boot from CD first. This is the problem. Don't do that

If only it were that easy. But I've just tried making every drive, one by one, the first boot device, and none worked. I'm now thinking that there might be a file that is being loaded transparently from the CD to make it load, and if i can copy that file over to where it belongs on my windows partition, all might yet be well.
I dunno, i'm grasping for straws at the moment. i HAVE TO fix this though. i've been too preoccupied with it not to see it through to a solution.

I'm certain that BIOS choosing the wrong device is causing the problem. Is there a BIOS option to boot only from hda and not include anything else in the list?

If not, time to email Saikee

Well guys, only one thing to say at a time like this.
I FIXED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I feel like such an idiot. All I did was disconnect the Secondary Slave drive, then booted, which gave me LI 9999999999999999, repeating, but the key is, it TRIED to boot LILO. I knew I was on the right track, so I reconnected the Sec. Slave, and voila, like nothing was wrong, there was the LILO prompt staring me in the face.

Don't worry guys, I'll be back with PLENTY more questions. Look out for me!

Thanks jstephens84, Randux, and fireball7 for your help. I'm just sorry I wasted your time on what amounted to not even being a Linux issue!

THANK YOU ALL!

Glad you got it fixed

ok is the linux partition on a slave drive?

Yeah, but LILO is on my Pri. Master

ok when you configured the config file did you say hd0,0 (whatever the seckond number is) or did you say /dev/hda(whatever drive) when it said root
it should be
root (hd1,x) (1 for the slave drive it might be a 2)

and if you did this all correct i just have one other thing that you can try

Think I am late to the scene.

The problem is strange to me. Disconnecting the slave disk will cause L99 over because Lilo cannot find the Linux partition or the hdb disk at all. Putting back the connection to cure it is something beyond my comprehension.

If I were to tackle it I would use a bootable Grub floppy and manully boot up the Slackware by these lines.
If Slackware fires up then I will concentrate on fixing Lilo and never touch the bios or hardware connection again.

Lilo do do manual booting but there is nothing to stop us to use Grub.

Slackware happens to be one of the easiest distros for booting too.