I just installed Slackware 11.0 on my computer, on sda1, partition 4. I am trying to boot Slackware with Grub, but keep getting "Error 23: Error while parsing number".

title Slackware 11.0
root (sd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1
initrd /boot/initrd

is what I added to menu.lst. Thanks for your help!

What do you mean with "sda1, partition 4"? sda1 is the first partition on sda, the fourth one is sda4. Please clarify that. And from looking after GRUB myself some time ago I remember that you cannot give "(sd...)" but only "(hd...)" but I may be wrong.

Why?? is ther a specific reason you want to use grub over lilo???

Oops, I meant to just say sda4, my mistake. But in the menu.lst I got it correct right? sda0, 4 is sda, partition 4? And thanks I'll definitely just put "hd" instead of "sd".

And no, there was no particular reason, except that I felt a lot more comfortable in Ubuntu, where GRUB is, so I thought it would be easier changing that than to figure out Slackware and change LILO.

Alright, changed "sd0, 4" to "hd0, 4" but I'm still getting the Error.

sda4 is hd0,3 -- GRUB starts counting with zero, LILO with one

Thanks titopoquito! Unfortunately now I'm getting "Error 15: File not found", but at least it's a different error hahaha.

I'm not sure, but I use a slightly other syntax for my grub menu.lst. I have no initrd but guess it should work too with the same syntax:
Else if you boot up you can try your luck with the GRUB shell. Just input the lines from hand (EDIT: without the title line) and you can use TAB for autocompletion -- this way you are sure that it finds the files or you may get an idea why GRUB cannot see one of the files.

EDIT: By the way, you are sure that "vmlinuz" and "initrd" are there and called exactly like that?

Are you running the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel?
If you are only running the 2.4 then you don't need to specify the:

In the grub's menu.lst file, having a entry like this should work fine:

If you have no reason for using grub then use lilo, it is certainly no harder to use and there is a script you can run called liloconfig, this script should automatically configure lilo for you, simply run liloconfig as root and follow the steps, make sure that you install to MBR, if you have a windows partition it should detect this and add it into the lilo configuration automatically

I used to use grub when I was a Slackware user. Its a lot better than LILO if you multiboot. Anyway, try the following
Make sure that the kernel and initrd names match the kernel and initrd versions on your system.

fotoguy- Thanks for the code, it worked perfectly, except I had to switch the sd to hd.

redazz- When I change the default kernel (2.4) to 2.6, what would the new kernel and initrd be?

Thanks to everyone for your help!!

You look in your /boot/ and use whatever versions of the 2.4 kernel and its initrd image that are listed in that directory.

Glad it help, yeah it should have been hd instead of sd,sorry about that.

By default slackware 2.6 kernels only have ext2 and ext3 filesystem support compiled into the kernels and not as modules like with reiserfs.

So if you go for a 2.6 kernel and have you partitions setup with reiserfs filesystem, which is the default, you will also need to create a initrd file to go with the kernel.

This is not hard to do, there is a program called mkintrd that comes with slackware which you can run after installing the new kernel and modules. If you install the 2.6.18 kernel just su to root then type at the command prompt:

Now you should a have a /boot/initrd.gz file, now just edit you /boot/grub/menu.lst file pointing to your new kernel and initrd.gz file.

As I currently use both I would suggest that neither is better than the other for multiboot, what exaclty do you base that decision on