I've just reinstalled as i made some mistakes & thought i'd do a clean install. But thats where my problems started.
First few reinstalls i'd go to boot up & i'd get a screen full of 99's (that was just before lilo). On the last install the installation detected my 160gb USB drive & my 40gb Windows drive. Now i've got it installed, it gets to detecting the USB devices hot.... something or other & it freezes.

What i done wrong? should i reinstall & leave all USB devices disconnected untill i'm into the OS??

I discovered it was hotplug causing my troubles. so i did a reinstall again & from what i could see my mouse wasn't discovered so when i typed in startx it wouldn't get into KDE.

Sounds kinda like the format with respect your drive geometry is all screwed up. IF you can afford to wipe the disk now, do the following...

Go into your motherboard's BIOS and make sure it's detecting the drive properly. Newer boards are kinda "hands off" about that and just show you the drive ID string (WD-2500JBblahblah etc) but the important thing is that if there's a setting that says "LBA" or "NORMAL" or "LARGE" set it to LBA.

(I know, this sounds insane, but I've had to do this to about a dozen machines in the last several years--including SCSI disks. Moving a drive from one machine to another can sometimes induce this problem--not everyone's implementation of LBA appears to be the same, especially with older boards. YUCK!)

Next, boot your Slackware CD, and login as root (on the CD, don't boot the disk), and from that prompt if your drive is /dev/hda, do the following:

WARNING: (as if you didn't clue in already) that will BLOW AWAY everything that matters on the disk.

Now, power the machine off and power it back up. The BIOS and your drive and the OS should all be on the same page as to what the geometry of your disk is. Run fdisk and partition normally. You shouldn't have any more crazy LILO problems unless you've got a bad (or 40-pin) IDE cable or imminent hardware failure.

By the way, if you were messing around with hdparm before, that was probably where your problem came from. Trust the kernel and the hardware to do the right thing at that level.

what i was doing was just trying to clean install. I will try that trick when i do my reinstall. I think it might have been because i made lilo change the mbr as the last times i was using option 1 in the lilo set-up (can't remember what it is exactly).

I will report back when i've tried it.

I don't understand how or why it worked, but your trick worked. Thank you kind sir. slackware even detected my windows ntfs drive (just a shame about the 160gig usb drive).

But i think it detected it as a SCSI drive though. All confused.

Once again, thank you evilDagmar.

The kernel (2.4 series) detects all usb storage as 'scsi'. No problem, just a quirk of that kernel series.

I don't even know for sure why it works. There's something very obscure going on with the way x86 machines track disk geometry that I just haven't found the skinny on yet. From what I know of things, this shouldn't be able to happen, but like I said, I've had lilo refuse me several times in the past complaining about what amount to geometry problems. My only guess is that a number of boards are writing something to sector 0 about disk format geometry (or maybe the disk is keeping it in it's limited flash space for all I know) and by erasing that and powering the machine off, it has to start with a clean slate.

As to USB disks (as well as SATA), get used to them appearing as SCSI devices. That's apparently the way it's going to be from here on out. At least with the 2.6.x kernels and things like HAL/messagebus you actually have a chance of them being autodetected and automounted.

unfortunatly it doesn't mount my usb hd. But to be honest that can be sorted at another date. I'm just glad Slackware is working again.

Right i have another boot problem.

It goes to detect my hardware & just freezes. I had just previously installed swaret & update went fine (as far as i could tell) so i closed down & did a reboot & now it gets 2 the hardware detect bit & just freezes.

Is there any way i can get round this or fix it (even better). I really don't wanna do a clean install again.