Allright. New problem. I have an older homebuild running an Asus A8N5X 939 mb. AMD 64 with 1gb memory. Has 1 IDE WD 37gb, (ATA 133 if that makes a difference) which
has a full install of Slack 14.1 and a second drive which is a WD 160gb sata. It also has a dvdrw, a cdrw and just for chuckles a floppy drive.
The sata drive has been formatted so it is clean. I thought to add it for storage, however a couple problems sprung up.

1. No matter how I set the boot priority, the sata tries to boot first and nothing gets done because there is no OS on it.
2. I have the cd set of Slack 14.1 and apparently the CDRW is not being recognized as a CDROM so it will not play the disks which allows the sata to attempt to load I guess by default.

The drives are set up as follows. Primary master is the WD 37gb IDE HD, with no slave, The secondary IDE master is the CDRW with the DVDRW as slave. The Primary
master for SATA is the WD 160gb HD with no slave. I thought this would not be the challenge it has become. If the CDRW/DVDRW is an issue, I do have another CDROM
I can install for purpose of running the disk set. Any help would be appreciated.

Welp, what's the output of ...?

You can tell lilo to use one drive as the MBR while putting the kernel and initrd on another drive.

I've been doing that with grub/grub2 for years and don't expect that lilo can't do it.

This was going to be my suggestion if you can't fix the boot priorities of the BIOS. For lilo, you'd just adjust your boot=/dev/sdX to the sata drive (use lsblk to find out what drive is what) at the top of your /etc/lilo.conf file. Keep the root=/dev/sdX entry under the Slackware entry the same. When finished, run lilo -t to test it and if there's no issues, go ahead and run lilo to write it to the MBR of your sata drive.

I don't think this is allowed in Lilo.
I once cloned (dd) my boot drive and wanted to setup booting from sda and second option sdb with lilo. It allows you to set it up (MBR on sda ; rest on sdb) but when booting you end up with lilo feeding you the infamous screen with 99 99 99 99

That must've been an issue with your setup. You can most certainly have your boot (MBR) on /dev/sda and your root partition on /dev/sdb1 (or vice versa).

Not exactly the same thing but ...

On different computers I've had 100% success with a separate /boot partition in software RAID1 configuration with 2 and 3 separate hard drives. Lilo uses MBR on each hard drive. I systematically tested by disconnecting all hard drives except one and the systems always booted.

Perhaps. I had MBR on both drives. Lilo written to both MBR's with options to boot from sda and sdb. My goal was to boot from either drive while being able to disconnect one of them. As soon as MBR lilo pointed to a drive (sdb) that is disconnected it would not boot (99 99 99 .. from lilo). Even if the first option in lilo pointed to sda and the second to sdb. Somehow lilo checks if all menu options point to an existing MBR and if one of them is not present it bails out.

<Edit : reading this back I see my situation was more complex then just having boot and MBR on different drives>

That machine lost it yesterday before the first answer I got. Currently is having issues with video card or something, however the machine I was working on still has the same issue. This one is a laptop with 2 hdd, 3gb mem. The first hdd is 160gb with full slack 14.1, the second hdd is 200gb with damaged windows that I would like to set up as second slackware for I guess storage or what ever you guys thing would be useful. The only upgrade to be made yet and will be in the next couple days is to go from 3 to 4gb memory. Here is the proc/scsi/scsi:

Attached devices:
Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: ATA Model: ST9160827AS Rev: 3.AD
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
Host: scsi4 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: ATA Model: ST9200827AS Rev: 3.BH
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05
Host: scsi5 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: TSSTcorp Model: DVD+-RW TS-L632H Rev: D400
Type: CD-ROM

Sorry, but I don't understand exactly what you want now.

I believe there is a different machine for which you are attempting to add an additional drive. Is it the case that the new drive is considered the boot drive by the bios? Or is it something else?

In my opinion, you would be well served by learning about LVM (logical volume manager). I personally had resisted using it for several years, since I believed that using it would add more complexity to my environment for little return. I was completely wrong in that belief.

tks will check that out.