I have a laptop. It came with Vista (ugh!). I updated to Win 7 when Dell sent that along. I cut Win 7 down to 50G and installed Slackware 13.37 on the rest of the disk -- I paid the danged Microsoft tax, figured there might accidentally be a use for it, so, phooey, leave it and dual-boot. I wrote the Slackware boot to the master boot record. Things worked.

Win 7 ate itself. OK, wipe the whole thing, reinstall Win 7. Wait through 157 (yes, kids, 157!) critical updates. Gag me with a spoon. Ten more in the last two weeks. Sheesh! Only thing I'll ever use the damned thing for for is TurboTax ('case TurboTax will not run in a Win 7 guest in VirtualBox on my "main" Slackware 13.37 64-bit box, mumble, grumble). Nobody knows why and I don't care all that much as long as I can get through the blasted tax returns.

Now, Win 7 occupies three primary partitions (that it creates on its own). I'd like to reinstall Slackware 13.37 64-bit on that box (the proc doesn't support virtualization so that's why the dual-boot in the first place). I can install Slackware in logical partitions, no problem but I'm wondering if there is some weird Microsoft thing going on that blows the MBR somewhere along the line and that I ought to figure out how to dual-boot so I don't have that problem again; hundred and fifty seven updates, gimme a break.

So, can I just tell LILO to boot /dev/sda5 and not have to have some USB stick or some nonsense handy all the time? I mean, just make /dev/sda5 bootable, tell LILO and that's it? Or..., or..., or is there some other way (like take a chance on the MBR)? You know, I do not want to have to rebuild the blasted thing again and to get any use out of it at all it has to have Slackware on it, and I'm not all that sure about what or how to actually accomplish that.

Thanks.

You should be OK installing lilo to the MBR. That's what I did when I had an XP Pro and Slack dual-boot. XP was automatically added to lilo.conf.

In a world without walls or fences, who needs Gates or Windows?

/I wish I had come up with that.

Yeah, that's what I did do with XP (and Win98 too) in a world prior to VirtualBox and never had a problem (boy, oh, boy, those were the days...). I did that with Win7, too, and could still boot Slackware, no problem, when Win7 decided that it wasn't going to boot (or fix itself or whatever the hell Microjunk does) which got me to wondering whether it had done something to itself in their secret system reserved partition. I really do hate the damned thing but it's almost impossible to live in computer world without Windows, particularly if you're getting paid to do stuff every now and again (I really don't use it for anything but Stamps.com and TurboTax and, well, Family Tree Maker but that's another story -- and those run just fine in VirtualBox).

I trust Slackware and I cannot believe that LILO blew something (it did boot Slackware and it tried to boot Win7) but who knows what evil lurks in Redmonds Evil Empire, eh? They keep yammering about protecting Win7 from whatever it is they try to protect their mostly crappy software from and... well, I dunno.

Thanks for the input.

I've never tried 7, and don't intend to. The only windows I've got now are the glass ones.

I usually install LILO to the Slackware partition and use EasyBCD to set up dual boot.

windows 7 uses a boot partition, that is one reason windows 7 creates three partitions, not sure what the other partition is for. Install lilo to Mbr and chainload to the boot partition, I think it will be the second partition, but not sure

In line with what dugan said, I've done a dual-boot with Windows Vista and Slackware using those instructions:

dual-boot-linux-and-windows-vista-windows-bootloader

One interesting information at the beginning is:

So I would guess that something similar is at play with Windows 7.

A little googling should bring you some tutorials on how to do the same trick with Windows 7

These instructions worked well for me:
http://www.iceflatline.com/2009/09/h...using-bcdedit/

If you do an update that causes lilo to be run, you may need to grab the MBR off your partition and stick it on the NTFS partition again. This happened once to me, but I'm not sure what caused it.

I've got lilo in the mbr and booting between windows 7 and slackware 13.37 with no issues.

Here's the relevant bit of my lilo.conf - note /dev/sda2 is primary parition and is marked bootable.