Hi

I have an old P II 266 Digitec laptop that I want to install Slackware 10.2 on. I had Ubuntu 5.10 (way too slow) and Damn Small Linux(Too minimalistic) on it before and in both cases it booted fine.

The installation of Slackware goes through with no problems but all I get after rebooting is "Insert Boot-Disc and press any key".

I have tried to install lilo to the MBR and to the super block with the same results. I have also tried to clear out the boot sector by 'dd' ing a file of nulls to it but the results stayed the same. The machine does boot OK from the floppy into the installed system. Its just so slow and floppies are very unreliable.

I would appreciate it if someone can offer me some advice.

Thanks

Lourens

Which was the bootloader that worked with ubuntu and damn small linux, lilo or grub ?

With Ubuntu it was grub. I'm not sure but I think it was the same for DSL

Try re-running lilo manually, does it give you any error-messages?
What does the actual boot-section of your /etc/lilo.conf look like?

boot = /dev/hda
?


Cheers,
Tink

You could try to install grub package and run grub-install /dev/hda

Lilo gives me the normal Added linux* when I run it manualy.

I tried both:
boot = /dev/hda
and
boot = /dev/hda1
no joy either way.

Try a
lilo -v -M /dev/hda

What's the HDDs geometry?


Cheers,
Tink

Hi,

lilo -v -M /dev/hda

reported:
/boot/boot.0300 exists -no /dev/hda backup copy made.
The Master Boot Record of /dev/hda has been updated.

but the situation stayed the same, it's still not booting.

hdparm reports the geometry of the drive as:
/dev/hda:
geometry = 2432/255/63, sectors = 39070080, start = 0

Thank you for your help so far.

Lourens

this is probably a dumb question, but did you remember to set hda1 as "bootable" using cfdisk?