I have installed Slackware 10.2 on one computer, Slack only with no problem, and have now installed on a second box, dual boot with WinXP which is where the problem exists.

I could see no way to resize the Win partition with fdisk, so I used Yast on a Suse cd to resize it, then did the Slack install. If I now do fdisk p I get:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4998. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: (1) Software that runs at boot time e.g. old versions of Lilo. (2) Booting and partitioning of software from other OSs e.g. DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK.

Device Boot Start End Blocks ID System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1668 13398178* 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2 1669 1731 506047* 82 Linux Swap
/dev/hda3 1732 4997 26234145 83 Linux

Booting from HD, Lilo doesn't run and Windows starts. Booting from floppy starts Slack. Lilo.conf shows boot = /dev/hda3. At the bottom it shows root = /dev/hda3, label= Linux.

When I run Lilo, I get a message - "Warning: Partition 3 on /dev/hda is not marked active. Added Windows* Added Linux."

Any help would be appreciated.

If it boots, then everything is ok. It's only a warning. I think you can solve it by using cfdisk and marking the hda3 partition as bootable.

That didn't work. Now I can't boot Slack from the boot disk either. Back to the install cd.

Any chance you can post your whole /etc/lilo.conf?

I could, but I just RTFM, and during the install think I chose "root" as the place to install Lilo. Manual says "Lilo will only load from here if the Linux drive is the first drive. I will reinstall and use "mbr" to place Lilo which should overwrite the Windows booter. I'll post results.

Okay, that fixed it. Manual goes into more detail than the on screen instructions. Installing Lilo to root worked when installing Slack as the only OS, but if dual booting install Lilo to mbr. Thanks guys for responding.

Thanks for letting us know you've got it sorted (and how--useful for other users). Glad to hear you're up and Slacking.

I think installing lilo to superblock didn't work because linux was on /dev/hda3 not hda1.