We talked about this in another thread, remember CW? I used expert mode. There is a problem that if lilo returns a bad return code it doesn't get displayed by the script so if the MBR doesn't get installed, the user doesn't know why.

I'm not saying that liloconfig doesn't work in the majority of cases. But we saw that for many people on this board, if there was a problem, liloconfig covered up the details and we couldn't see what the problem was.

We should look into whether or not there is an issue between Grub and Lilo since we have now heard this from more than one person.

Saikee?! Where are you?

Today I got Lilo to work with box #2, the Emachines on which I had first installed Suse/WinXP using Grub.

My first attempts to install Slack on this box were dual boots with WinXP that were bad. Lilo would run and ask for Linux or Windows. If I chose Linux all was well. If I chose Windows, it would load but the only way to get out of it was to pull the plug. I did more installs, Slack only, and upon boot Lilo gave me a choice of Linux or Windows. Those didn't work either.

Before doing the final install, Slack only, the one now working, I booted with a Win98 boot disk and did fdisk /mbr, not one but three times. Then, after doing a slack install, all is well with Lilo.

Not so on the third computer. Did exactly what I previously did and still no go. Lilo won't boot Slack and I get the usual message -

"Verifying DMI Pool Data .............
Boot from CD :
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

Actually, it doesn't matter on this computer. It runs 24/7 and if need be I can always boot from the floppy.

I did a lot of googling Lilo and did see a couple references that Lilo will not work with certain BIOSs as it also says in the Slack book. Maybe mine is one of them.

This is finally over and I can get to more important things.

Thanks everyone for helping.

Nice one, congratulations.

Regards,

dkpw

I'm sorry I'm late to this thread, but I've had some lilo issues that sounds similarish to what you've been talking about. For anyone coming in search of more answers, this might help.

Basically I think my problems have come down to the fact that my primary master IDE channel (hda) was not being used to store the MBR. In several cases hda for me is a DVD-drive, 'cause I'm using SATA drives. In these instances the only way I've found of getting around it is a lot of hacking and slashing with lots of iterations of `lilo -b /dev/sda` and similar. I had an issue recently where lilo coughed and choked until I'd told it `lilo -b /dev/sda` at least 3 times and who knows how many times `lilo -M /dev/sda` was forced upon the system!

Those coupled with judicious uses of running just `lilo` eventually sorted out the problem, but ... wierd wierd wierd, it was.

I could speculate on the actual problems forever, but, I think that's enough =)

Congratulations to ezor on fixing your problem, glad things are finally working right!
- Piete.