tri-booting lilo question

i've been dual booting mandrake and winXp for some time now. i just bought a new 80gig drive and installed slackware onto it. i didn't want to mess with lilo during install, so i just used the boot floppy to get into slackware. now that its set up, how should i edit lilo to continue booting mandrake or winxp and simply add slackware as an option? i added an entry to lilo.conf in Mandrake partition for hdb1 which is my slack root partition, but upon selecting it at startup i get a kernel panic msg. do i need to install lilo on the slackware partition too? if so, is that the only place it is needed or was i right to add a slack entry to the original lilo.conf in mandrake? my sytem is :

hda1: windows (c)
hda5: mandrake linux
hdb1: slackware (brand new hdd)

hmm the way you describe it seems to be correct for me.

Can you post your lilo.conf? maybe there lies the error.

If you were in Mandrake and wanted to add an entry for Slackware to lilo.conf you should have temporarily mounted the partition that contains Slackware's kernel into a mount point in Mandrake (probably Slackware's Root partition) - then modify lilo.conf , taking into account the mounted nature of Slack's kernel- fiinally - run /sbin/lilo to create the map and install the loader .

LILO requires all kernels to be mounted locally before it creates a new map file.

You should add something like this in your lilo.conf
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hdb1 # Here should be partition where is your slackware instaltion is.
label = Linux # Label could be whatever you want
read-only # Non-UMSDOS filesystems should be mounted - this is in my slackware lilo.conf by default, but i dont know what this means.

then run lilo. Then it should work. If not look that you have modules installed in your /lib directory

Today I had some spare minutes and read the Lilo documentation (yeah, I know, I'm a geek ) and found something interesting:

Are you sure the new hdd is /dev/hdb and not /dev/hdc?

It it's the latter one you might have to tell Lilo that hdc is on hardware address 0x81 and not 0x82.

This is described in detail in /usr/doc/lilo.../readme.volumeID.

It was introduced in v 22.5 that comes with Slackware 9.1.

thx for your help everyone. i'm sure the slackware root partition is hdb1
here is my fstab entry for said partition:
"/dev/hdb1 /mnt/slack ext3 defaults 1 2"

and here is the lilo.conf:
"[ed@lsn ed]$ cat /etc/lilo.conf
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
default="linux"
keytable=/boot/us.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=off quiet"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux-nonfb"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=off"
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="slack-linux"
root=/dev/hdb1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=off quiet"
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label="windows"
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/fd0
label="floppy"
unsafe
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.21-0.13mdk
label="old_linux"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.21-0.13mdk.img
append="quiet devfs=mount acpi=off"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="failsafe"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=nomount acpi=off failsafe"
read-only
"
this is all on my mandrake system. i haven't had time to try yet but i'm guessing i need to do something on the slackware end too, i.e. setup lilo but i'm confused about having too lilo's, since the one that currently works for mandrake and winxp is on the MBR and should do the job.???

You do need the change the following:
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="slack-linux"
root=/dev/hdb1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount acpi=off quiet"
read-only

This will use the mdk kernel. You need something like
image=/mnt/slack/boot/vmlinuz {check what the exact name of the kernel is}
and
initrd=/mnt/slack/boot/initrd.img {again check what the exact name is; I actually don't use this for my slack isntall at all}

then run
/sbin/lilo -v

And you don't need to do anything to your slackware install. Lilo gets installed once and you have to edit lilo.conf in the distro from which you are isntalling lilo into the mbr. In your case it is mdk and you are all set once you edit lilo.conf in mandrake and run lilo. This is what I have on my machine too so I know it works

got it working (-: thanx all.
in case this helps anyone in the future...
i set init="myslackrootpartition/boot/config"
where config is a link to config-ide-2.4.22.

this was confusing me for some time since the file is not called
initrd, and every src i consulted including man lilo, man lilo.conf mentioned only initrd and the utility mkinitrd, which does not exist on my slackware installation. neways, thx again