What does this look like? Do you mean the elilo menu?

Also would be good to post your elilo.conf

With elilo you can use the "simple" chooser, or the "textmenu" chooser.

Simple chooser is just a single line that pops up and loads the default, unless you hit 'tab', where it will show a list of the other boot options. If you press tab you can type the option you want, followed by any command options with whitespace separators.

Example Scenario: I have my slackware boot option labeled as "Slackware-15.0" in my elilo.conf, and I need to boot to runlevel 3 because my xdm setup is borked, and maybe I'm throwing in 'nomodeset' also. To do this I boot the machine, press 'tab' when elilo pops up (which also shows a list of valid boot options, in case you forget). Then I type:
The other way to boot elilo is to use a "textmenu" setup, which is basically a boot menu that you use arrow keys to select from a graphical menu, similar to 'dialog' based guis. If you use the default example elilo config for that (supplied with elilo's docs), then there is a field to enter boot options.

HTH.

Actually it did. It turns out this Acer is a perfect laptop for Slackware, so long as you set up grub.
And don't mind having 12 cores.

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Sounds like you ran into this issue: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...re-4175671086/

It has been around for a while now. IIRC, elilo is no longer maintained. It certainly has issues with some - but not all - new systems. I think its possibly bios related, but I'm working from a sample of one!

Grub certainly fixes it, both at installation and post installation, but is not activated by default, nor is there an option to do so.

I've switched all my computers over to grub now, even old pre-EFI ones. There is a small learning curve initially, but once mastered, you'll never go back!

--
Pete

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Grub2 is certainly more capable than elilo and this is from a long time lilo lover and grub hater BUT I see the learning curve, not as daunting, but having a poor Cost/Benefit ratio - Far too much energy In for gain Out. far simpler, and human readable as well as very well documented right in the human text refind.conf file, is rEFInd. Essentially no work on a single system PC and very little on a multi-boot system.