I just ordered an inspiron 5680 i7 geforce 1060 and reading about win 10 security problems is freaking me out. So i think i will be spending more time in slackware, i have been away for a while entranced by windows games

I was thinking of taking the drive from my current computer, with lilo installed on the MBR and intalling it in the new inspiron, switching the inspiron to legacy boot and specifying the lilo drive as the boot drive.

Will this work?

Any thoughts on how the original drive in the inspiron would be specified in lilo.conf? /dev/sda2? There is an ssd in the new computer and idk how those are specified?

It should boot, but the details will probably be wrong. You will have drivers for the old PC, not the new. Reinstall and/or rebuild the kernel and you should be a lot further along the road.

There are basically endless size limits with the MBR format but it's one way of eliminating EFI. I share your thoughts about UEFI, MBR, Lilo although I realise I may be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century at some future point. I share your thoughts about windows 10. I have it confined to a VM. It doesn't even have my name. It boots (very occasionally) and says " Hello Tight Ass!":-).

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If you don't want to use Windows, it would be much more efficient to just wipe it out and install Slackware anew, after having disabled Secure boot in the firmware's menu if need be.

You will most probably get better performances using the SSD of the new machine than your old drive.

If you want to use Windows 10 on occasion, see how to make an ISO of it that you could use to install it in a virtual machine. Or if you have plenty of room on this SSD, just resize main Windows partition to the minimum allowed (do it from Windows) and install Slackware in the emptied space. This works too.

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@ business_kid: there is nothing frightening or nasty about UEFI. Just learn what it actually is and how to use it.

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Looks like the Inspiron 5680 SSD is NVMe so it should show up as /dev/mnve0. The original drive should show up as /dev/sda. I'm guessing that Windows will be installed on the SSD. The Slackware 14.2 installer will not install to NVMe drives, however I do believe that the latest release of Slint does. You should be able to do a fresh install of Slackware in UEFI mode on the orginal drive and dual boot with window. Finally most UEFI firmware has what is called Compatibility Mode (CMS) which will allow you to be able to boot Windows in UEFI mode and Slackware in legacy mode. In any case you will need to disable secure boot.

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Thank you, thats very helpful.

There's an option in the latest Slackware (14.2 at the time of this post) to use elilo, which is an [U]EFI-enabled Lilo. I use it on my desktop, and it works just as one would expect.

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What i would like ideally is to have my Slackware-current install available by just plugging the the drive to the new computer and changing the boot drive in the bios.
From what i have read, elilo sounds a good alternative to grub, which seems (and i admit i have only a glimmer of understanding of it) needlessly complex compared to lilo.
Is it possible to switch to elilo prior to installing my current slackware drive in the new computer or will elilo only work on computers with efi or uefi?

And thanks for your help

Try this:

1. Make sure you have installed elilo in the EFI system partition of the drive in the old computer.
2. Download EFI3M and run it as root:
   Code:

   sh EFI3M

   Choose "Build and install the multiboot menu on your computer" then accept to install it in the BOOT directory (this is necessary).
   Then you can customize the label if you want.
   After that you can also make a rescue USB stick if you want.
3. Then you should be able to boot this drive on both computers. However I don't know if their respective hardware are fully compatible, but that would be another topic.

Please tell me how that goes, as this is a use case for EFI3M that I didn't consider at first.

PS EFI3M is supposed to be a multi-boot menu, but of course works also for only one system to boot. However, if you have several systems on the new computer, run it from there to get an entry for each in the boot menu.

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Thanks man, i will let you know how it goes when the new on arrives next week.