Hello:

I think I need a 'time-out' to understand what is happening here.

I believe that my Slackware install went alright up to the LILO install, right?

During the LILO install, I chose 'expert' because in response to a previous question about dual-boot set ups, it was recommended that I do not install the boot loader to the MBR but instead, to the root directory of Slackware and,I assumed after reading the LILO install help, that the only way to do this was to use the 'expert' option, right?

By installing LILO to the superblock of the root partition (sda8), I was guaranteeing that Slackware would not (could not) start, right?

At this point, I thought that Slackware was 'fully installed and ready to go' but simply not bootable until an adjustment was made to the boot loader's menu.lst file, right?

Actually, I thought that I would just start OpenSuse and do 'update-grub' and Slackware would appear in the boot menu.

But now, I am getting the feeling that Slackware is not 'fully installed and ready to go', right?


Is the foregoing correct, even close?

Thanks,

no your slackware is fully ready to go, you just need to make an initramfs. i am not sure why you installed with a bootloader, if you were attempting to use grub as the bootloader for all your OS's. also, i would not suggest chainloading slackware, as i think that will make you go from grub, to lilo, and then to slackware, which, while functional, is not the correct way to do it. you need to direct grub to slackware's vmlinuz and initramfs, and then slackware will work just fine.

or if you are not particularly attached to grub, you can always just reinstall slackware and use lilo as the bootloader, as that should auto-detect all the OS's on your computer.

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If you installed lilo to your root partition all you need to do is chainload that partition using your grub. To chainload the menu.lst entry would look similar to Windows except the hd partition numbers would be different.

In my prior post it gives you an easy way to do this using YaST.

You are right, do not rush things that you do not understand, it will save you a lot of problems later.

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This entry should work if you change the kernel line to Yancek chainloader entry should also work, but adds an extra step to the booting process by chainloading from suse's grub to slackware's lilo and then booting slackware.

If you have already created a /boot/initrd.gz file then this entry should work

The generic kernel has to have the initrd.gz to boot, but the huge kernel doesn't, which is what /boot/vmlinuz points to. Root=/dev/sda9 tells the kernel what partition the root file system is located on. Hope this helps.

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Took a another look at your text file, and if I'm reading it correctly then change your entries to this
or
I was assuming your Slackware is on /dev/sda9 but it appears to be on /dev/sda8.

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You did fail to mention that if he decides to chainload he will not have to change boot menu as long as what ever he puts into that partition has its boot loader in / whether up grading or changing distros. What happens when he has to boot an ext4 file system?

Don't know what you mean. I'm able to boot ext4 file systems with both grub legacy and and grub2

I have never been able to get a grub legacy to boot an ext4 partition direct. I have chainloaded them with legacy. I finally gave up the fight and switched to grub2 but still chainload all my distros.

(Hi again) I tried the above but lilo did not find OpenSuse but it did find Windows.

Because I didn't really like OpenSuse, I decided to install Linux Mint Debian to the OpenSuse partitions and let the LMDE grub install take care of all 3 OSes, which it did. (Thank God! or whomever)

I appreciate all the info that you guys provided and I will work at understanding those parts that were 'over my head' at this point in my Slackware career.

I will mark this thread a 'SOLVED' because I don't know how to mark it 'BAILED OUT!'

I did, however, successfully connect wirelessly to the net today and this post is reaching you from Slackware and not LMDE.

Thanks again,