Hello, I've been trying to install Slack for about six hours now and have gone through it seven or so times. The problem I had earlier was that cfdisk kept seeing the drive as GUID (It had FreeBSD on it before), which it was, but I was hoping that reformating it in cfdisk would change that. It did not and while Slack seemed to install fine, at the end LILO always reported a geometry mismatch. So I stuck the drive into a Mac and reformated in making sure it was MBR this time and Dos. That worked as cfdisk did not report that the drive had GUID on it, but at the end LILO still gave me the same error.

Lilo:
Sorry but the attempt to install LILO has returned an error.
Warning” device 0x0820 insonsistent partition table, 1st entry.
CHS address in PT: 0:64:1 —> LBA (4032
LBA address in PT: 2048 —> CHS (0:32:33)
Fatal: Either FIX-TABLE or IGNORE-TAble must be specified.
if not sure, first try IGNORE-TABLE (-P ingnore)

Making a USB boot stick did not work neither and so I'm here seeking advice on what might be going on and how to fix it. I used slack back in 98 for about six months and liked it and hope to solve this LILO problem to tackle more worthwhile ones. Any suggestions?

The bios I changed also to make sure it was MBR as well, btw.

Is there no grub boot-loader available in the install? I checked the LILO config file and it seemed fine in that the partition being pointed to was sda1, which is correct ... but past that I don't have enough experience to begin to guess.

Thanks!

Been there.

Have you read the file BOOTING.TXT on the install cd? You can use the install cd kernel to boot and pick up your main root system while you sort it out. Just boot on the install cd and look at the screen before you log in.

Thanks for the suggestion - no I did not try that. After I posted the question in the forum, I noticed that Slack saw my drives as SDA, not HDA as you would think. They are not scssi but rather regular sata drives.
I took a Debian 7.0 USB stick I had lying around and wanted first to see if Debian would see these drives as SDA as well (it did) and secondly if I would have any troubles installing and booting it. I used Debian to re-created and re-format the partitions and install Wheezy. It installed and booted just fine.

Then I went and used the same Slack USB drive I had used earlier and re-formated the hard drive, but keeping the Debian created partition map. Slackware installed this time with no error messages about LILO. There was an errore message about the drive appearing to be GUID (I had changed my bios back to EFI) and the installer mentioned that the drive did not seem to have GUID partitions. I continued despite the warning (btw I had seen this same warning the very first time I had tried to install Slack) but this time, using the Debian created partition map - No problems!

Installation completed just fine, LILO went into the MBR and Slackware boots just as it should. Later when I have time I'm going to do it all over again in the name of knowledge but it is nice to know that Slackware will run on this machine of mine and I'd like to mention that it seems to run very, very nicely - to boot.

Now if I could just get it to install on my 2012 11" MacBook Air. That is going to be the next project. I have not tried it yet but hope to be able to boot Slackware just by itself on this machine. I absolutely love OSX but if I can get Slack installed on it and running fine it will be a perfect way to go cold turkey for a while. That would be good for me, and my rusty skills.

The lie of that land is is follows:

1. hda is obsolete. It's the kernel that changed it back around 2.6.X(??). The new driver uses sda for 1st, sdb for 2nd etc.

2. Using gdisk (GUID) on a boot drive implies EFI, and BIOS seem set that way. Using fdisk for the partition table is non efi.

Mark thius solved, good luck with your Macbook, and start a new thread when that barfs.