Slackware install reboots perpetually at GRUB
 

I just installed slack 9.1 and the installation supposedly went well. when I reboot for the first time, my bios goes through its normal routine, and then "GRUB" flashes on the screen for a second and then disappears. The system reboots and repeats infinitely. I put lilo on the root partition. I am not getting any error messages. It did give me a message once that I should make sure that one of my pci slots needed to have sharing of IRQ enabled, but I could not find anything about that in the BIOS. I reinstalled slack with the same results.

thanks for the much needed help. I'm really dying to try slackware.

Did this box used to have another distro running on it using grub? Sounds like you have a defunct grub installation in the mbr.

Try having lilo install to the mbr. That'll clean out the dead grub and take over.

Should be an easy fix. Use the cd as a bootdisk to get you in for the first time. After that, go into the KDE control panel and look for bootloader under systems. You can probe and check config to fix the bootloader.

Yes, I did have suse installed before. I didn't put GRUB/Lilo in the MBR at the suggestion of Slackware. How problematic can it be for it to be installed in the MBR? Just curious, since I've already had one version of it there already.

thanks for the help

I've run Linux on various (x86) boxen over the years and have yet to have or witness any problem with putting bootloaders in the MBR. Lilo and Grub both seem to know what they're doing.

Grub does not come with slackware. Grub was something you had on before I am guessing. It may be that it messed up your MBR. Are you dual booting with windows? If so do the repair console and do 'fixmbr' which will rewrite your mbr, allthough if you have odd partitions it may mess some up. Beware.

I think you should put lilo on a floppy, then set your bios to boot from floppy, it MAY get to that ahead of grub, try it and see.

EDIT: And failure man, how in the hell is saying youve never seen problems with grub or lilo gonna help him? Was there any point in saying that?

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People don't seem to be analyzing/reading posts very well these days......

:o

Shit. Sorry. I thought he was replying to the first dude, I missed the other posts :(

Sorry about that.

Possibly. I interpreted the question as being related to the reliability of doing so and still don't see another way to interpret it. If I'm wrong, well, reword the question so I get it or don't bother listening to me. :p