I just upgraded to slackware-current im still running ext3 but thought i might try upgrading my fs to ext4. before doing so i used an empty partition to test it. made hda2 it ext4 and cp -r /boot /mnt/hda2. i rebooted went into the grub console root (hd0,1) told me it was ext2 type 0x83(i read ext4 is backward compatible with ext2 and 3) so i tried kernel /b(tab) brought /boot/ (tab) brought some file name that was all jumbled and doesnt exist. I really dont want to use lilo just to get ext4. is there some way i can fix grub to use ext4? im using grub from slackware-current/extra.

You may need to apply a patch to grub legacy. I think it was developed as part of Google's Summer of Code. I believe it has been added to the Grub2 development branch.

The other way around might be to keep /boot as ext3 and convert the rest of your filesystem to ext4.

well, i tried installing grub2, but i cant seem to get it to run grub-install, it never does anything, just sits there. and grubconfig doesn't seem to work on grub2 because there's no /usr/sbin/grub

You could try making a separate /boot partition and format it as ext2 or ext3...

well i got grub2 to install, but now grub2 sees hda2(ext4) as /boot/???????}\ -> /

ps same result from formating from slackware-current setup and mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/hda2. also mounting it from linux returns the correct files