Howdy everybody.
My last tinkering episode rendered my slack installation useless. And since I had only been running it for a week or so, I decided to reinstall--much quicker than trying to fix all the problems I created. Anyway, I booted from the Slack CD's I used last time I installed, set up the keymap, and logged in as root. I'm planning on using the same partition table that I had before, so I guess I really don't need to run cfdisk, but I tried it anyway. cfdisk terminates in the fatal error: unable to read disk. But when I run fdisk -l it lists all my partitions. One swap, and two linux partitions (/dev/hdb1 *bootable and /dev hdb2).
Since the partition table is intact, I decide to go straight into setup and format (reiserfs) and install. Everything is installed without a hitch, until I get to the configuration section. No matter how I try to set up lilo, I get an error: Sorry, lilo could not be written. This happens in both simple and expert mode no matter how I configure it. I made sure to specify the bootable partition, the location, etc. Last time I installed I got the same error so I had to change lilo.conf to show the MBR location as /dev/hda (it was originally set to /dev/hdb). This time around, no matter what I set as my MBR location, lilo cannot be installed, and everytime I boot I get the same error again.
I can't remember exactly what it said, but it was something along the lines of: searching for boot on ide 0...OK and then nothing but pairs of 9's:
99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 (for half a screen) Last time changing the MBR location to /dev/hda solved the problem. But this time, no matter how I configure lilo with liloconfig, and no matter what I change in the lilo.conf file, I still get the same boot...99 99 99 99. Irritating.
I guess my question is: Could this be related to the cfdisk issue being unable to read the disk? I kind of doubt it since I can mount /dev/hdb1 using the Slack installation CD kernel, and everything seems to be installed. Maybe I'm missing something obvious in my lilo config. If anybody has any ideas, please let me know.
-Kris

Create a boot floppy when you install and use that! Are you creating a dual boot system?

Your main (/) partition might be too small. I got a lilo write error when I made my / partition only 4GB. Problem was it had no room to write. But then again your setup did work before so that's rather odd... Sorry I couldn't be of anymore help ;\

Yeah, as far as the boot floppy, I should have made a new one. I figured that I'd just use the one I made last time I installed, since everything was going to be the same, but it won't work. And I can't figure out how to make a new one without going through the whole install process again. So as of right now, all I can do is boot with the installation disk and mount dev/hdb1 using the mount dev/hdb1 /mnt -t reieserfs command. I figured I could just get into /mnt/etc and edit my lilo.conf file and reboot it, but no matter how I set up lilo.conf, it won't boot.
For size, I have 8 gb for my / partition, so space shouldn't be an issue.
And I still can't figure out why cfdisk will not read my disk.
Idea...once I have dev/hdb mounted at /mnt, can I run pkgtool to create a boot floppy? I can't remember if that's an option with pkgtool or not. I have a couple classes yet this afternoon, so I'll have to check when I get home.
Maybe I should reinstall...I'm sort of worried about the cfdisk errors. But I've tried it twice and I get the same error: can't read disk. It's weird because fdisk -l lists all my partitions. And my HD is recognized during boot from the bare.i kernel on the CD...heh obviously if I can mount it. Jeez louise. Why the hell won't cfdisk read the disk?

Fixed. For some reason, I had to specify "cfdisk /dev/hdb" to get cfdisk to work. Re-partitioned, reformatted, reinstalled, reconfigured lilo, and I'm up and running again. Almost back to normal. Got pretty much everything back the way I had it except for Mathematica fonts and mplayer, which hopefully I can finish tonight.
Thanks for the help everybody.