Hey all! Here's something I've been trying to figure out for two days now.

I had my laptop set up to dual boot XP Pro and Slackware 9.0. I had to re-install XP, so in the process LILO was overwritten by the NT bootloader on the MBR.

I now need to find some way of getting into Slackware so that I can reinstall LILO, and get everything back to what it was.

Being a new Dell laptop, I don't have a floppy drive on this, so there are no boot floppies.

I have the Slackware 9.0 CD, but it's acting strange for some reason. When I boot from the CD, I get the "boot: " prompt where I usually just hit enter to load the bare.i kernel image that's located in the "kernels" folder on the CD. If I try hitting enter, I get the error "Cannot find kernel image: bare.i" I even tried entering "bare.i root=/dev/hda1 noinitrd ro" but I got a similar error.

I was thinking it could be a corrupt file on the CD, but I found that everything loads just fine when I boot from the CD on the other computer. So that's not the problem.

I really need to find some way of reinstalling the bootloader or at least some way of booting into my Slackware partition.

Anyone have any ideas...please!
Thanks in advance!!

P.S. My CD-ROM drive is hda1, and the root Slackware partition is hdc6

Try getting another CD, maybe a live-distro thing (there's a live slack at slackwarelive.org might be slackware-live.org ) and see if you can get in. Once you do, mount and chroot into your root partition:
mkdir /mnt/slacky
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdc6 /mnt/slacky
chroot /mnt/slacky
And then re-rerun lilo, after ensuring it's correct:
/sbin/lilo -v

HTH

Cool

I actually downloaded Morphix and I was able to boot into that. I then mounted /dev/hdc6 to /mnt/slack and ran sbin/lilo

But I got an error about /boot being read-only.

I also tried "sbin/lilo -C etc/lilo.conf -M /dev/hdc6" It said that the MBR has been modifed and returned to the bash prompt. Thinking it had finally been fixed, I rebooted, but nothing had changed

Did I do something wrong? I didn't use "chroot" Could that be the problem?

Isn't there also a NT loader? I thought I read someone booting win98, 2000, linux off of the NT loader.


EDIT: Also there is
Linux BBC that is under 50mb and gives you a command prompt. Has a bunch of tools on it, not sure if lilo and grub are one but it may be.

Haha...that was, in fact, the problem. Since I forgot to chroot to the mounted partition, it was trying to write to the root directory of the live CD, thus giving me the read-only error.
After passing the chroot command and running /sbin/lilo it added Linux and Windows to LILO and wrote it to the boot record.

Amazing
Thanks a ton for your help, MasterC!! I owe you bigtime

Yeah, I believe that method uses the NT bootloader to load bootsect.lnx, which in turn calls on LILO. I should set it up that way to avoid having similar problems in the future.

Wow you guys are fast!

Hehe...finally fixed a problem that was bugging me for 2 days. I'm so happy to be back in Slack

Glad I could help Anytime I can give 2 cents in the Slack forum makes me feel good.

Cool