hi

i'm running xp, and added a second harddrive to add linux on. until i'm comfortable with knowing i can fix the mbr if i need to on this box, i've been booting slack10 from the install cd 1, using this command.

boot: bare.i root=/dev/hdb6 noinitrd ro

it boots up, and i can get into the gui, however, when i exit the gui, instead of returning to text mode, it gives me a blank screen. so my question is...am i getting a blank screen because i booted with the install disk...or is there some other problem i should be looking at?

tia

jay

Hmmm. That is interesting. Well I can answer your question about being able to fix the mbr. There is one of 2 things you can that will *always* fix mbr problems.

1. If lilo somehow gets written over or corrupted in the mbr put in the slackware boot cd(1 or 2, doesn't matter) and mount the partition(ex. mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/hda6) but before you mount it there you'll have to create something to mount to in /mnt/(mkdir /mnt/hda6)
After that just do this :
shell #: chroot /mnt/hda6
shell #: lilo -M /dev/hda mbr

That will reinstall lilo into the mbr of hda. And all is fixed. Or if you need to activate a partition its "lilo -A /dev/xxx N"
lilo --help should tell you all you would need to know.

I have done this many many times. It always works.

The second is that if for some reason that doesn't work, boot up your xp install disk, go to recovery console then type FIX MBR or FIX BOOT. Cant remember if there is spaces between those or not. XP will then boot automatically but at least your system will be running so you can get on the net and figure out your problem.

As for the black screen when you logout. I don't know. I'll do some googling and see what i find.

Try booting it with vga=normal on that boot command line

thanks guys...the problem WAS the vga setting...i corrected it and now it's running slick

You may have already done this, but if you're using lilo and don't want to have to pass in the vga parameter at boot, just make certain that the vga=normal line is uncommented (and that all the other vga lines are commented out) in your /etc/lilo.conf file. -- J.W.

i boot with grub which i installed with my suse installation. i multi-boot xp, suse and slackware.
i had some problems with lilo before, and found that grub has always worked excellent for me, and i could configure it easily. i added "vga=788" to my slack boot line, and it's working great now.
thanks for the suggestion tho...