I recently installed slackware, and followed the bitbender guide.

I have a pretty good linux backround, and it went pretty smooth.

My partition table looks kinda like this

hda1 5GB /
hda5 512M /swap
hda6 1.5GB /opt
hda7 3GB /home

With that in mind, the HDA1 is set to boot, and while in setup, root was setup to boot.

I get a blank screen, with the cursor blinking at the top left.
Its booting past post, and my PXE boot doesn't loop, meaning theres something telling the BIOS that an OS booted. But nothing comes up?

I have a varity of live distros to boot the HDD up with, I already booted mandriva to check the boot partition. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It seems no bootloader is installed or something with lilo is wrong. Try reinstalling it
and check lilo.conf to see if everything is ok.

Did you install lilo to the MBR? That works for me.

Looks like you need to boot from the installation CD and see what went wrong. I've done it recently because of a stupid mistake during a security update...

You do it like this
1) Boot from the first installation CD, hit Enter when the system asks you to login as root.
2) Type mount /dev/hda1 /mnt Now you can get access to your lilo.conf file. It's at /mnt/etc/lilo.conf If you could copy its content here it'd be nice. In any case, there should be a line near the top saying something like
boot = /dev/hda What does it say exactly?
You'd probably need to change that file. You can do it like this

nano /mnt/etc/lilo.conf

3) To reinstall lilo afterwards, try
lilo -C /mnt/etc/lilo.conf

Thanks for all the tips. I figured the "grub" was bad, although it uses lilo. The only thing thats weird is, any live CD won't boot for some reason. I'm using the DVD to install by the way.

I can boot mandriva up, with the HDD in as a secondary HDD. And my mandriva HDD as primary. Thats how i checked the partition table.

I'll try to get lilo.conf info for you guys.

Here's my lilo.conf file.

I can't get the slackware DVD to boot, unless i used a different HDD. Something from this install is causing the boot CD to not boot.

Is your BIOS set to boot from CD before HD? It must be to boot from a CD. Your computer shouldn't even touch the HD when you boot from the CD (unless the software on the CD tells it to). LiveCDs should definitely work. Does your CD drive work from within Mandriva?

I can boot any Live CD or in general bootCD from this machine, as long as the HDD isn't the one in question. It's really strange, but one strange thing, even when I stopped installation and restarted it, the same thing happened where I could boot the CD, until I reformatted the drive.

It works fine with mandrive, I'm listening to a CD right now (I booted the mandriva HDD.)

Yup. You have lilo installed on the superblock of your root partition. You probably want it on your MBR, in which case you change this line to

boot=/dev/hda

and rerun lilo.

so I'm going to guess that running
will re-run lilo. Even if its being run from the mandriva?

Just double checking won't be back home till later to try it.

Thanks for the help by the by.

So i Finally got the file re wrote. Its hard to change a file on a device that isnt mandriva native.

anyhow, i got the lilo.conf file fixed.

When i rerun the lilo -C /mnt/etc/lilo.conf

I get a error