[NBLUG/talk] Install Help

[Mark Street]

Ahhhhh, our old friend lilo.  maybe you did not specify a root partition
on install of lilo?  You may have not have done anything "wrong".

lilo is running from the mbr if you are getting the lilo prompt requesting
a root partition... but lilo cannot find the root partition which is why
it is asking you for root...we don't know why at this point why
root=/dev/hda2 is not defined since it is a fresh install.  you have two
choices, give it the correct parameters on boot from the lilo prompt...
but even if you give it the correct root=/dev/hda2 we still don't know if
it will boot because lilo still needs to find the kernel and an initial
RAM disk image if it is going to be used.. and we don't know what
lilo.conf looks like. You will find out though as soon as you boot it with
the root=/dev/hda2 parameter.

I would try to a rescue disk (hint Knoppix) or USB drive to take a peek at
lilo.conf and rerun lilo to install back to the mbr. (hint, chroot . and
or lilo -r )  If you do go in and take a peek write down lilo.conf and
post back to the list.  If it is too much, you can always re-install and
start over with a clean slate.

Do you plan to do a lot of development on this machine?  Lots of source
code to compile and install?  Why a /usr/local on a laptop?
Personally I would have used grub and a different partition scheme keeping
/ or /boot close beginning of the disk;

/dev/hda1 = /
/dev/hda2 = swap
/dev/hda3 = /home ... if you really must split off /home

> Hi Everyone,
> I've been struggling to get Slackware installed on an Acer laptop. I'm not
> really familiar with what's going on but I'm hoping some of you can fill
> in
> some pieces.
>
> I repartitioned my harddrive like so:
>
> /dev/hda1 - swap
> /dev/hda2 - /
> /dev/hda3 - /home
> /dev/hda4 - /usr/local
>
> I went through the install process without incident, and selected the
> default option for the LILO bootloader and the default option for
> installing
> the MBR.
>
> When the install completed I rebooted and (sorry I don't have the message
> in
> front of me) received an error asking me to add a root=___ param to the
> boot
> loading options.
>
> I take it to mean that the bootloader, LILO, cannot find the MBR. Is that
> correct? I've tried passing in root=hda and root=/dev/hda2, but neither of
> those options worked.
>
> Any help in explaining what I did wrong would be much appreciated.