slackware 9.1 + lilo could'nt write to MBR
 

Well, after the success installing slackware on my PC I wanted to install it on my notebook, too. My Configuration is a Win on NTFS on hda1, followed by 2 Fat32 Partitions. There's a partition with ext3 and a swap (redhat 9 created them).
I installed slackware 9.1 following the guide in this forum (worked perfectly) but when he tried to install lilo he sayed that he could not write MBR. Well, no bootloader was there. What now. Please help me, since when I don't get slack working until monday I have to reinstall redhat again. Well, university starts again ;-)

Did you try installing LILO via the 'expert' mode? That usually solves the problem.

yes, i tried the expert setting, but no matter what I do it does not install. I tried to install it to root as well as to mbr. Always the same error.

It always says:

Sorry, but the attempt to install LILO has returned an error, so LILO has not been correctly installed. You'll have yo use a bootdisk to start your machine instead. It should still be possible to get LILO working by editing the /etc/lilo.conf and reinstalling LILO manually. See the LILO man pag eand documentation in /usr/doc/lilo for more help.


I also tried in the shell
lilo -P ignore

but without result

The MBR will be on /dev/hda1 I suspect. From what you are saying, this is an NTFS partition, and Slackware does not come "default" with the ability to write to an NTFS partition. It is my understanding that writing to NTFS with Linux is still unreliable. Unless you reformat hda1 to a fs that Slack will be able to read and write (fat perhaps) you will need to boot from a floppy to boot to linux and let windoze boot directly from the hard drive (hda1) if a floppy is not in the machine.

Try not installing lilo in the MBR and it should work. That is what I did on my laptop after it was unsuccessful in the MBR. All worked fine when I installed in the other option (can't remember what it is though, think its something like supernode??). Could never get it to work in the mbr.