Hi,

I've been using Slackware for a few months, and I absolutely love it!!. However, that was on my old PC. This one I just built, has an Athlon 64 3400+, and it has some SATA drives (no RAID).

The install seems to work just great (goes through entirely, tells me to reboot, etc), but when I reboot, I get a message that says "Verifying DMI pool integrity...." (no big deal, it always says that). Right after that, it prints the letter "L" and hangs dead. I'm guessing this "L" belongs to the LILO (not sure what it says, isn't it something like "Linux Loader <version>"?).

So, now I'm stuck in Mandrake, and I hate it. At first I thought that problem was Slack only, because Fedora Core 2 worked just fine. Then I realized that FC2 uses GRUB. So today I tried the Mandrake install, and it did the same thing as Slack (the reboot hangs). However, Mandrake gives an option to use GRUB, and GRUB seems to work just fine.

My question, then, is:

Can I install Slack (I left a bunch of space on this HD) and not install LILO, and add it to GRUB? I haven't had much experience in GRUB ("growing up" with LILO, as it were).

Also, I don't know if the standard Slack install will work with my SATA drive(s), as I haven't been able to boot (though, as I said, the installer works just fine).

Any help is much appreciated,

Neil

Neil,

You probably will have trouble with the SATA drives. See my web site for info on this (WWW button below-I have made an ISO for SATA Slack installs, as well a boot disk).

As far as the LILO problem, YES it is LILO that is printing the 'L' you see, I have seen this before.. more then likely it is a bios problem from what you have described (You said it does this in Slackware Lilo and when you installed Mandrake with LILO too?? I didnt quite understand that.. you may want to explain it further..)

(Either it is a BIOS problem or your LILO config file is screwed up and not understanding where to boot anything from.. try booting up with a rescue/boot disk, mounting the root linux drive in question (Where the lilo.conf is) and edit /etc/lilo.conf .. I am not sure how familiar you are with lilo configs, so let me know about this, too..

Anyway let me know about the LILO Configuration and maybe double check all your bios settings?

bc

**EDIT**

Oh ya, you can use GRUB anywhere you use LILO so to answer your question. YES. You can do this...(You said GRUB works.. but it sounds like you want to use LILO preferably... so that shouldn't be problem.. just fix your config sounds like...?) GRUB is highly configurable 'on the fly' that is you can add stuff directly from menu as I recall.. (I to am a LILO 'person' and even though GRUB is alot better overall, I also 'grew up' with LILO and feel more comfortable with it

Well let me know..