i recently decided to give slackware a shot on my old 550mhz amd compaq. it had been running red hat, but i wanted something that would hopefully run a tad faster on the old girl. so i downloaded slackware 9.1, only to run into problems in the installation. i partitioned my hdd to have a bootable linux partition and a swap partition. installed slackware, etc etc. after the install i cannot get it to boot. the computer begins to boot then hangs up simply saying "grub" on the screen and a blinking cursor. grub of course being one of the linux boot loaders, funny thing is i didn't install/load grub, not intentionally anyway, i installed lilo(i don't need an os selection boot loader btw). any ideas on how to fix? if i run from my bootable slackware floppy and then try to get it to boot to the hdd from that shell prompt it makes an attempt them bugs out.

help.

Never experienced it (never use grub) but I've seen this a lot. Search for it if I'm wrong but what I recall is that you have grub on the mbr and installed lilo to the root so need to reinstall lilo to the mbr to overwrite grub.

lilo -M /dev/hda

if your hard drive is /dev/hda. to check, do a
cat /proc/partitions

more info :
man lilo