If you guys remember my past posts, I've stated my hard drive has been having bad sector errors...well now I think the drive has finally died. I rebooted the machine and the only thing that appears after the BIOS menu is appears blinking dash. I then booted to a livecd distro and mounted the drive and all of the files still seem to be there...strange maybe it isn't dead. Could it just maybe be that LILO got messed up this time around?

I don't have much time but I read a slackware wiki how to reinstall LILO, I will try that when I have time.

Never mind. I didn't read the OP carefully enough.

I am confused what you are saying. It is mountable so that means it is still working right?

Altiris, My mistake I didn't read your post carefully enough to see that you had already successfully mounted the file system on the disk. Sorry for the noise.

It might be that the boot sector is the one that failed. You'd be able to mount the partitions, but the drive will not be able to be used to boot.

You can re-install LILO to see if that fixes the problem.

Well if this rules something out... yesterday i had the exact same issue. I spent about an hour pondering what caused it. Suddenly i realised that my external harddrive underneath the desk had not been turned off last night when i shut down the computer, and the BIOS was trying to boot from it. I turned it off, and LILO appeared as normal.

You might want to double check any devices that are plugged in, and then adjust your boot priority for those devices.

The blinking cursor does sounds like a lilo issue - check which device is tbeing booted first by the bios, then try re-installing lilo in a chroot environment - this is something like the process:
http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/29/re-...kware-boot-cd/

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Alright guys quick update. I have bought a new hard drive and ran fsck on the old corrupted drive to fix any errors (there were quite a few) and then proceeded to copy via rsync all of the contents from the corrupted drive to the new hard drive I bought. Rebooted with ONLY the new drive (old one is set aside) and the computer still boots with the - cursor. Okay fine...I'll just use the Slackware CD to chroot into the system or boot the system that way right? I tried following this, http://www.slackwiki.com/Reinstalling_Lilo but this is not working.

I tried doing huge.s root=/dev/sda1 noinitrd ro but it did not boot my system, it just booted the regular installer...why?

Did you re-run setup after replacing the drive?

Bad idea, as you did copy all the errors from the old drive to the new one.

Make a new, clean installation to the new drive (when asked at the TARGET installation step, do format it), then copy from the old drive to the new one what you want to keep, not blindly with rsync, but checking each file in the process.

No? I just copied all of the contents from the old drive to this new one. I am trying to chroot now using this I found http://blog.tpa.me.uk/2009/09/29/re-...kware-boot-cd/ but I am getting "chroot: can't execute '/bin/bash': Exec format error"

Ahh wait I forgot something about the /etc/fstab, it is using UUIDS and not /dev/sda...maybe this is the problem? Ill boot into a livecd of another distro I have to correct the problem real quick.

EDIT: I was booting into 32bit version of Slackware. The Slackware CD is made too easy lol. THe CD has the top and bottom labelled as 32/64bit I thought if it was on the bottom id need to flip the cd but no its the opposite.