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LILO works on one computer but gives L 40 40 40 ... on another

Okay, I think I know what the problem is, but i don't know how to fix it. I've installed slackware 9.1 on my old laptop hard drive:

NEC Versa V/75
486 DX4 75Mhz
20 Mb Ram
540 Mb Hard Drive

Since the laptop has no floppy or CD drives, I had to take the hard drive out and connect it to to a pc with a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter and install Slack via PC. On the PC (AMD K6-2 450Mhz, 64Mb Ram) Slackware boots just fine, but when I put the drive back in the laptop I get the "L 40 40 ..." error which, from what I can tell from some documentation, is an I/O error of some kind.

I have actually gotten I/O errors on this laptop before when putting Windows 98 on it. Apparently it won't handle a FAT32 filesystem so I FDISK'd it with dos 6.22 and was able to get it up and running after that so I am wondering if this is a similar situation altough I got another distro to work with ext2

A few weeks ago I was able to get RedHat 7.0 working perfectly on it and then I used the ext2 FS for the partition so i thought it would be safe to stick with it, but now I am getting the before mentioned error when trying to boot slack.

I would prefer to use Slack because RH 7.0 sucks really bad and it's ironic that, so far, it's the only distro I can get running on this thing so far.

For those that are curious here is my lilo.conf:
I don't think anything in here is at the root of the problem, but I am willing to here suggestions.

# LILO configuration file
# generated by 'liloconfig'
#
# Start LILO global section
boot = /dev/hda
message = /boot/boot_message.txt
prompt
timeout = 1200
# Override dangerous defaults that rewrite the partition table:
change-rules
reset
# Normal VGA console
vga = normal

# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda1
label = Linux
read-only
# Linux bootable partition config ends

Thanks
-cor-

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

stefan73

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corwashere

ASKER

That's what the problem may be. So to my next question. If I create a small (10 Mb or more?) partition and mark it as bootable, will the slackware installation know to put the boot files there or do I have to explicitly tell it somehow. At first glance, I don't see anything in the installation program or in liloconfig which allows me to set this.

Thanks,
-cor-

corwashere

ASKER

That did it! All I did was create a 10Mb partition mounted it as boot and the installer did the rest!

Thanks for your help! The points are well earned :)

Corey

stefan73

corwashere,
> will the slackware installation know to put the boot files there or do
> I have to explicitly tell it somehow

You'll have to tell. The boot flags are only used by DOS.

Stefan