I have a 40gb HD with WinXp on the primary master and a 6gb HD with RH 7.3 on the primary slave. RH was originally loaded on the 6gb in a seperate pc on the primary master. I had lilo installed on the MBR. When I re-installed RH I had lilo installed to the /boot partition because I was going to dual boot with Windows loader on the primary master HD. I set my bios to boot to the linux HD and I get Load Linux................................ and it just sits there. I used CD and booted into recovery mode and the lilo.conf file looks ok. I am still a newbie to linux. Do you guys have a suggestions to why linux won't load? I want to get linux booting ok so that I can create my linux.bin file to go on my windows HD. I can change my bios and still boot into WinXp ok.

Thanks for the help in advance.

well if you get passed the initiial LILO (first letters on the screen that do not come from the BIOS) I guess the problem is no longer Lilo related. Something goes wrong while loading the kernel or the initial execution of the kernel after it's loading in the memory. Where is that /boot partition located (master / slave) and more importantly why do you need it? What is the 'boot=' entry in your lilo.conf file? It should be something like 'boot=/dev/hdb' so it writes to the MBR of the slave disk. Try using 'lilo -v -v' to see if all is ok while writing to this MBR.

The /boot partition is on the primary slave and the lilo.conf says boot=/dev/hdb1
everything seems ok when I run lilo -v -v. It did give a warning at the beginning that the /dev/hdb1 was not on the first disk. Install gave me the option to install to the MBR but it was the primary master MBR and not the primary slave MBR. I have installed RH twice before I started this thread and same problem exist when I try and boot linux.

the entry in your lilo.conf should be 'boot=/dev/hdb' and not 'boot=/dev/hdb1". This instructs Lilo to write to the MBR of the slave disk. which can then be executed by the bios (if you set it up like that). Now you're writing the boot instructions to the boot sector of your boot partition on the slave disk but I doubt if your bios loads it there. It is weird though that it manages to load lilo past the initial letters. It could be that the MBR of the slave disk still contains the boot instructions from the time the disk was master in the other computer and therefore hangs when he tries to execute a kernel that has been reïnstalled a couple of times.

Since you are trying to dual boot using NT oader why go through the hassle of writing to the MBR if you can write it to file directly? You could create an empty file using 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/filelocation/filename bs=512' And then instruct lilo to write the boot instructions to that file ('boot=/filelocation/filename'). After executing lilo copy that file to your windows partition (or create it directly there if it's Fat32) and make an entry for it in the boot.ini. NT loader should be able to load lilo which then loads your kernel