LI - wheres my LO - lost with second HD

[gofast]

Help me someone Im losing my mind. I have slack happily installed on hda3. So I go and buy a nice new drive, 30 gig, and decide to try other installations. BUT:

If I use lilo, it boots new installations using the kernel on my slack distro. If I install lilo on the boot sectors of the hdc partitions and use the "other" command in the MBR lilo, it passes it and then I get as far as LI.

Lastly, if I go into the distro on hdc1 and just ignore my slack distro, trying to put a simple lilo file on my MBR that boots to the hdc, I STILL only get LI. I have tried running it with -L to no avail. It is a recent lilo version that gets past 1024.

The conf files are simple, boot=/dev/hda (in the case of trying to write it to the MBR), image=kernel name, root=/dev/hdc1, read-only.

The frigging conf file I use in my slack distro is the same - except root=/dev/hda3, and there is a second entry that has the other distro in it, like the one above.....

ANY help wold be great!

[Tigger]

the partition that the boot directory is on must be either hda or hdb.

boot into slack on hda3. mount the hdc# partition under /mnt or something like that. copy the kernel from this partition to /boot on slack but rename it to something different than the slack one. eg. vmlinuz-redhat. now edit the /etc/lilo.conf file on slack and add the entry for the hdc# partition by copying the slack entries and just changing the root line and the label line. run lilo and it will be fine.

there are 2 factors to consider for booting:

1-/boot partition must be on /dev/hda or /dev/hdb
2-/boot directory must be under the 1024 cylinder mark on the drive

if slack booted fine from hda3 then just follow the steps to add the other distro to lilo. do this for all other distros you install and do not let them install lilo.

if your pc is in a non-bootable state, use your lilo bootdisk and get slack back as the main linux distro with the lilo used from here.

[gofast]

Thanks for the help - but I still have one question. Suppose I want to dump the slack version on hda3 and give all of hda to windows. Then I want to run Slack on a big fat partition on hdc. It would seem that I cannot boot the hdc version, because when I wrote a lilo.conf using the hdc distro, and wrote it to the MBR on hda, it still hung on LI.

Is that remotely clear?

Thanks......