Hy!

I've got a Slackware 10.2 related problem. I've installed it on an AMD machine, using kernel bare.i, without X. The installation went OK, but as i restart the machine, nothing happens, using installed kernel starting from boot CD works fine.... Is it a problem having /var, /usr and /home on special partitions? What could be causing problems? (I doubt it's a bios related problem, because there was Windows XP installed previously and it worked, since then bios settings were untuched).

Can you clarify a little?

Are you saying when you restart that the machine goes through the motions, and then just stop doing anything before it should restart? Or that restart literally does nothing - the system stays exactly as it was.

If the former, you may need to load something like the APM modules (find the APM line to uncomment in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules).

I mean, when the machine reboots, the bios outputs its output and than nothing, just cursor blinking and empty black screen behind it, no error msgs, nothing..... During slackware installation, i've installed lilo to MBR, it worked with no errors, than i manually installed lilo again, installation worked like a charm, but when i reboot it, it still happens nothing...

I tried to uncomment the APD line, but it's still the same...

Sounds like one of two things:

1. Missing or invalid boot record on the hard drive. eg, lilo installed improperly or the boot process is not able to read lilo. (unlikely but it can happen)

2. In the BIOS the boot sequence doesn't include the hard drive. eg, CDROM->Floppy->Network instead of CDROM->Floppy->HDD

Both good suggestions here.

I would add that something is definitely not perfect with the liloconfig script in the Slackware installation. Many people use it and it works perfectly. Many other people use it and get no errors but it doesn't work. It seems like bad return codes don't get exposed to the user from the script and so you assume everything was ok, but in reality lilo was screaming "problem!"

Lilo itself works fine. I would suggest booting the Slackware installation disk and going through lilo manually. It would be a good idea to post the output of fdisk -l and your lilo.conf.

The other guys always remind everyone to check if they have a BIOS which doesn't allow MBR updates (so-called anti-virus). So look at that also.

I've found the solution! It was a disk failure. I was using 2 disks attached on one cable (ATA), one master and other slave. I tried to change that, switched both to master and attach both of them on their own IDE port. Now it's working! Thank you for your suggestions!

Good that you fixed it and thank you for updating the post.