Hi all
Recently did a clean install of Slackware 9.1 on a Power Edge 2450, with dual proceesors, and 4 Ultra 160 SCSI HDD's with RAID5.

No problems during the install process, although I had to use the adaptec.s boot disk and install 1 & 2 disks to start the process off.

Installed LILO to the MBR and everything was fine, rebooted after the install and upon booting and with LILO starting I get the
"LILO: timestamp mismatch" and thats as far as it goes.

Has anyone seen this error before? I did a quick search on Google, and saw posts on bios problems, hardware problems etc etc but no definitive answer.

Any feedback would be apprecated.

Thanks
Spectek1

I've seen this before.

During install my filetimes were further ahead then when I first booted new installed linux, which gave me the above error.After I waited 2 hours (which was the future time of some files) all was well.

Seen it as well during kernel compile (same future time related issue).

I got this error as well, I don't think it has anything to do with file times necessarily. I think my machine got the error because I have a PCI card with hard drives on it that LILO didn't know what to do with, I ended up using GRUB instead, and that worked fine.

I have had this problem too, using Mandrake 9.2. After I go through the CD-ROM install and it reboots I just get "LILO - Timestamp Mismatch" and it stops right there. Afterwards I ended up reformatting the HDD. My setup may be a little different from yours tho, I have 2 HDD's with WinXP, the second (hdb) would be the HDD I used to install Linux.

This is very frustrating as that's about as far as I got with my install. Some people have said that GRUB has worked well for them, but how do I use GRUB instead of LILO, that's what I would like to know.

I have run into this lilo error, timestamp mismatch, a couple of times. In both cases, I was reusing a drive that formerly was part of a hardware raid array. I believe it to be a lilo bug when installing a boot block on the drive's mbr. It seems to still be unfixed as of lilo 22.5.7.2.

I noticed the following in the latest lilo change log:

Version 22.5.9 is a minor update to version 22.5.8

o Add "bmp-retain" keyword for those using splash screens at startup.
o Binary distribution adds a statically linked copy of LILO.
o Bugfix for duplicated volume IDs at boot-time; adding a disk often resulted in a "Timestamp mismatch" panic stop.

I don't recommend this workaround to anyone, because it may mess up your partition table and other bad things. Don't do this if there is anything you can't easily restore on the drive. This workaround may be useful when reusing an old drive. It assumes you are going to write the lilo boot block on the mbr.

First boot the slackware installation CD or equivalent (I install via pxelinux). Then do:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1 count=512

Then, use cfdisk to format your drive partitions. Follow this by running setup to install slackware. When you set up lilo at the end of the installation, install on the mbr. When you reboot, you should see the normal lilo boot screen, not the timestamp mismatch panic error.

This message has been deleted.

I found cfdisk to be the culprit. When it created the partition table it caused problems. So I created an empty partition table in fdisk and the edited it with cfdisk.

Still having the same problem, I have two hdd's, both occupied by WinXP I want to partition one and run linux off of the free space on the hdd. And I want to create a boot menu so that I can chose between the two winXP installations and the Mandrake installation. btw what is cfdisk?

cfdisk is the "graphical" and more userfriendly version of fdisk.