Can't install lilo --> Inconsistent partition table
 

I get the following error when installing lilo:
Some have suggested that I issue lilo -P ignore, but that only destroys my MBR and therefor is not an option.

My lilo.conf is pretty much default.

fdisk -l /dev/sda says that some partitions do not end on the cylinder boundary. I can only assume that this is an important hint.

I have never had this problem when dual booting with XP only now that I've installed Windows 7.

how exactly are you booting back into slackware after the win7 install? are you able to load windows? Is it safe to assume that you simply re-used the winXP partition(s) for win7?

Maybe install Grub?

I started to get this problem when I installed FreeBSD aisde my OpenBSD, XP and -current partitions. I've been using lilo -P ignore for months without any problems as I haven't had the time to format and install everything again, now that I don't need the BSD partitions anymore I formated them as ext4. Hopefully a new and clean install will fix evertything.

I've booted into Win7 without installing lilo. So, slack is installed but I can't boot to it. I guess I'll try grub.

The long story short: I encountered such a problem using one of the last versions of Slackware – prior to 13.0. I coped with that running Slackware CD-ROM, mounting Slackware partition in /mnt directory, chrooting to /mnt directory and running lilo command.

The whole story is here.

By the way: according to fdisk manual “fdisk is a buggy program that does fuzzy things”. The same manual advise to “try them in the order cfdisk, fdisk, sfdisk”. So if you’d like to avoid complains about partitions not ending on the cylinder boundary backup your data and recreate partitions using cfdisk.

Thanks for the info ,w1k0 , i had never read the whole man page....hummmm...maybe explains why i did have such a problem with Lilo years back in 10.1 slack release....also hosed my hardrive by the way...thanks again

I know you are trying to trouble shoot lilo. For awhile I was duel or triple+ booting and at times the bootloaders (Windows, Lilo, GRUB (Legacy and 2,) wouldn't work together. So I started using G.A.G Bootloader. I am not sure if this would be an option for you if things don't go right. I also believe that lilo would have to be installed on the root partition.

I suspect the only people reading the entire manuals are the authors. It'd be nice to read all Unix manuals but there's a lot of more inspiring activities. In fact reading them isn't sufficient. One have to read them, remember them and be able to use them. I wrote a few manuals for programs I invented. I read each of them a few times when I wrote them. Now I use the basic set of switches allowed by my own programs. When I need any rare used option I have to read my own manuals anew.

This seems to come up a lot with windows 7, with the way it partitions itself. The one time I tried to setup a dual boot I had to install slack then windows 7(using cfdisk to create the partitions). Then go back and reinstall lilo from the slackware dvd.

I am not really sure what the root cause of the issue is as I am not much of a windows user anymore so I haven't looked to much into it. It doesn't seem to use the standard sector zoning format. Normally you will have a few megabytes of space left after creating partitions but with win7 you don't anymore.

I'm not sure what happened exactly, but after failing to be able to install grub I reinstalled slackware using cfdisk instead of fdisk but that didn't seem to work and gave me the 99 99 99 etc error. But then I booted with my usb drive and then rebooted and now it appears it works fine.