For some reason I don't get the lilo screen, just a constant stream '40' all over the screen and it just keeps going. I can boot of the floppy no problem, everything looked ok in the linux.conf on the hdd so i ran Lilo again, rebooted and had the same problem.....

Only got this on 1 of 3 linux boxes (all running slackware 8.1), anyone have any ideas as to what is going on???

It is a problem with Lilo. Whether it is an install issue or config issue is hard to tell without knowing your system pretty well. For instance, if you had install lilo before using the MBR of the hard disk, and this time used the root partition; now then the MBR is out of whack. Rerun liloconfig and setup for MBR would be the easiest. Or boot a DOS disk and run "fdisk /MBR" at the DOS prompt. That was just a for instance, the permatations are numerous. But the numbers indicates that lilo is not loading.

I did a post a few days ago for Smart Boot manager. You might look up that URL and try that if you are unable to resolve the lilo issue.