I just dusted of one of my old laptops with slackware 7.1 and decided it was time to upgrade it.
I installed latest stable version slackware 8.1 on several other computers, so cannot understand why the installation fails!
I'm installing from an ISO-burnt slackware installation CD.
(tried two different burns in fact! Worked perfect before!)
My partitions where deleted and recreated with cfdisk, and
low-formated before installation.

My laptop is a Acer Travelmate 507DX, see specifications:
http://www.superwarehouse.com/laptops/1695details.html

If somebody managed to install it Travelmate 507DX let me know, please!

Anyway, installation procedure follows as normal.
As I'm lazy I just added a full install with all packages (how can anything go wrong? ). My disk space is 2771.92 MB
should be sufficient.

After installation, in the configuration process, I'm never asked for lilo configuration; whether I like it installed over master partition and so.
I'm prompted for installing kernel from CD, choosing bare.i,
which I always been using.
Then there is keyboard, timezone, mouse, network, gnome-manual generation (creation of bootdisk, I boot from CD so skipped it!, no modem)
But I'm not asked for lilo installation.
When prompted for setting root password, the /usr/bin/passwd is not found.?

I booted the system from CD, running pkgtool.
I could not find lilo-packages installed. I don't understand it
cause I remember during the installation I saw pop-up description of the package. So running "lilo" command from
the installed system of course fails.
Most of the system files seems to be at place at first glance,
I have however discovered that certain important config files
such as rc.modules , rc.M, rc.S, rc.[0-6] are missing.

My file system when booted consist of (df) :
/dev/ram0 /
/dev/hda5 /mnt

I'm not able to mount any cdrom aka
mount /dev/cdrom /cdrom -t iso9660 although that can because I booted through it and it's locked by the /dev/ram0 mapping.
Also /proc seems to be empty?
/etc contains a lot of config-files but not lilo.conf-sample.

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Any helpful solution to the problem would be of great appreciation. I don't know if there is anyway that the I could
have locked down the previous system leading to this failure. It's hard to believe as I already deleted it, incremented its size, created new partition and low-formated it. I know there is some locking option in lilo, I might have used it but I am 90% sure I didn't.
--
I believe the liloconfig files where installed on the system but deleted when something fatal happened during the configuration procedure?? (This cause during one of my installation attempt, I logged on to another shell and when lilo where installed there seemed to exist "liloconfig" )

Puzzled! I'm sure it's the most silly thing.

I guess I solved the problem.
I realized of course that since /dev/hda5 was mounted
to /mnt that I need to mount my cdrom as /mnt/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom.
It seemed that doing a installpkg on lilo-*.tgz on both CDs
I got a "tar file is corrupt" . The installation script running setup ought to display it!. (Some other packages seemed
to install well)
Anyway, d/L a new iso and burnt it! Also overrided the
master boot record using fdisk /MBR (dos version).
Before initating a new install.
This time I where promted about the lilo manager so I suppose it all went well.

I think the information and error messages go to console tty2 during the install, just like FreeBSD does, so I think this is the standard.
I guess the moral of the story is to watch both the installation console and this console =-].