So I recently decided to get back into Linux after taking an unintended hiatus for a few years. I ran Slackware for a number of years without any hiccups until just before 13.37 released, when I went back to Windows as my primary OS.

Now I am back and was looking to get right back into Slack, but I am not able to complete installation. I am running the following custom-built system:

ASUS Sabertooth x58 mainboard
Bloomfield Intel Core i7 920 2.67GHz (OC to 4.2GHz)
8GB Vulcan PC3-2133 DDR3 @ 1600MHz
128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD (Windows 8.1 currently installed)
1.0TB Western Digital Black HDD (Where I am trying to install Slack)

The installation keeps freezing at the 'Installing the Linux Loader...' point. It will just sit there until I hit Enter, which then the installer moves on, but LILO was never installed and I cannot get the system to boot into Linux. I just get the error, "This is not a bootable disk, please insert a bootable floppy disk and press any key to try again" whenever I try to boot to the drive.

I also tried creating a USB bootdisk and bypassed LILO configuration. I wanted to get to terminal on the system and try to install LILO manually and record any errors, but I get the same "This is not a bootable disk..." error when I try to boot from that USB bootdisk despite the installer saying the bootdisk was created successfully.

I am at a loss to what to try next. I don't think it's a hardware issue since I run Windows 8.1 without a hitch, but I'm not sure if that really means anything. I feel more inclined to believe it's something with my boot configuration, but I've already tried everything I can think of there as well. The SSD was the primary boot device in the BIOS prior to me attempting all this, but I have since set the HDD as primary. Still no luck.

So like I said, I am at a loss. Any suggestion or idea that I haven't thought of yet would be welcome to get me started in the right direction.

Thank you.

Maybe a uefi problem since your using windows 8.1. If it is uefi then will have to use slackware64, format the drive for slackware as gpt, create the first partition type ef00 and formated as vfat32 before beginning the installation.

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So I looked into the UEFI issue as you suggested, colorpurple, and I was not running my disk as a GPT. So I changed the drive in Windows to GPT, and used gdisk to partition the drive with the EFI partition, the Microsoft Reserved, and then swap and my regular Linux system partition.

I went through the installer again, and again the LILO installation froze. Before it started it however I noticed there was an error that flashed on screen, which is the following:

Googled what this meant, and I see that it is because the disk essentially is holding on to the MBR boot info despite the disk being converted to GPT. There are lots of instructions on nuking the GPT identifiers to make the MBR work, but I am not seeing any instructions to nuke the MBR to make the GPT work.

Again, all suggestions/ideas welcome.

Are you using the slackware64-14.1 iso? Need to use Slackware64 for efi. Fdisk doesn't work with gpt format. If you can, boot into the hard drive install with the installation disk, create a /boot/efi directory if it doesn't exist, then run eliloconfig(may have to mount the efi partition to /boot/efi first).

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I apologize, yes I am using the slackware64 14.1 iso. While continuing my research, I decided to look into making sure that the MB supports UEFI. I couldn't find any hard data online, so I called ASUS. And per their tech support, my MB has the UEFI option disabled by default, and the BIOS does not give an option to turn it on. This of course makes me scratch my head, because I was under the impression that Windows 8 REQUIRED UEFI to run at all.

I will do what you suggest regarding elilo. Which also, per a video I watched the 14.1 installer should detect the EFI partition, and provide the option to setup ELILO (rather than LILO) automatically. Which it is not doing. It still only gives the option to config LILO.

I don't know if lilo works with gpt disk. Grub2 comes with Slackware64-14.1 and works with gpt. Maybe you can get it to work with your current setup.

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Thank you. I am posting this from Slackware. It was LILO. All I needed to do was configure GRUB2. Thank you, colorpurple.

I feel a bit silly because I Googled installing GRUB2 into Slack and realized how simple it really was. Should have RTFM.

Thank you again, Color.