Slackare boot is 1&0's
 

Hi All,
I'm a total newb and am trying to install Slackware 9.1. All went well until I rebooted. I get nothing but ones and zeros cursing across the entire screen. When installing lilo, I opted to try the "automatic installation".
The other options were install to a floppy, or, something else that "could be dangerous" according to the install program. I tried the auto install twice, once with network configured, once without. I could not get past the
network logon, so I tried the last few times without configuring network.
Anyway, the install guide asked if I would like to do the auto install of lilo,
but there would be more work to do later to make it "bootable" again it said, with fdisk. I tried to use the boot disk created during the install proccess, and it seems to work but the /dev/hda1 IS bootable according to
fdisk. This is where lilo is I believe. If anyone has any ideas please help!
Thanks,
Billyjr

You don't need to mark a partition as bootable for linux to boot off it. So that is not the problem. What you need to do is change you setting in lilo.conf to install lilo on /dev/hda instead of /dev/hda1. That is the "could be dangerous option" but the reason why it "could be dangerous" is it will overwrite any other boot loader you might have because it will install lilo to the MBR. Once you have changed the setting run lilo and try to boot then and see if it works. If not, try getting grub, I have always had more luck with it anyway.

Thanks JT,
I'll try what you said, but it may take awhile, I really don't know what I'm doing. I installed RH9 but it is way easier than Slack 9.1. Will this stop the ones and zeros?

JT Shaw,
How do I "Run lilo"? Does'nt it start by itself on boot up?

type lilo at the command prompt. You have to do this to update your actual boot loader

JT,
I did as you suggested in your first reply about doing the Dangerous thing.
It was'nt so dangerous after all. I got the Fat Penguin sitting on top of my screen. At the bottom it says dark login. This is a good thing! Now it's installed but I can't do a damned thing 'cause I don't know the commands.
How do I get to the KDE desktop? I can learn from there. Thanks again.

Run kdm and you should be able to log in and choose your window manager.

I think it is in /opt/kde/bin/ if I am not mistaken, just so you know.

Jt,
I got kdm.... then selected kde and it came up fine. I entered a user name and pword but I get "login failed". I hav'nt set up any users yet, so this is probably why. I'm getting off my thread here but how is this done? Thanks.

On the command line run adduser. It should prompt you for the relevent info and then you will be all set to log in.

Btw, if you want to have kdm boot at startup add /path-to-kdm/kdm to your rc.local script in the /etc/rc.d directory.

Set up new user account, but now I can't get back to kdm. All I did before to get in was type kdm at the root@darkstar:~# Am I entering the proper command?

ya, kdm is the right command. Unless you have changed your path if it worked before it should still work now.

I did'nt change anything other than the user account. Heck I don't know how. I've been following your instructions so far and they were very helpful.
I'll try rebooting.

Reboot worked ! KDE desktop is on. Thanks for the help JT.