Lilo

My first reboot after installing Slackware hung on the bios line "Booting from hard drive (C:\)".

The problem was that in the installation I had set lilo to install on the root partition of the linux installation (/dev/hda1) and not the master boot record (/dev/hda). The slackware installation told me that this was safer but would only work if the partition had been set to be bootable when doing the partitions with fdisk. However despite doing this, it didn't work.

Now I'm not really too fussed where lilo is installed, so the fix was quite simple. I first booted onto the machine using the boot disk which I made during setup - if you didn't make one (due to laziness, running out of working floppy disks five years ago or not even having a floppy drive in your machine) you could use the slackware CD.

It was then trivial to change one line in lilo.conf from "boot = /dev/hda1" to "boot = /dev/hda". Run lilo, restart the computer and "hurrah!" we have abrand spanking new bootable Slackware system.

Lilo still needs more work to get rid of the disgusting menu and increase security, but we'll come to that later.