Been running into some issues with a couple of machines I'm trying to
set up and I can't figure it out.  I've looked at two different books:
Slackware Linux Unleashed (Sam's Publishing) and Linux System
Administration Black Book (Coriolis), along with Slackware website, and
have only found a partial answer.

Here's the scenario:
I have two machines I'm trying to install Slackware 7.1 on.  The first
one is an old Gateway P120- 32MB ram, SCSI CD-ROM (ID6), 200MB SCSI HDD
(ID4 or 5), and two 800MB IDE HDD's.  Second machine is an old Compaq
ODP-83, 32MB RAM, 400MB IDE drive, 200MB SCSI HDD.

When trying to install Slackware on the first machine, I can get it to
do so successfully if I do one of the following: 1) Leave all HDD's in
the machine, and put LILO to a floppy.  It'll boot successfully, and
work fine.   2) Remove second IDE and SCSI HDD's and put LILO to the
hard drive.

With the first scenario, if I try to configure the LILO.conf file on the
HDD, then boot up I get nothing but scrolling 0's and 1's and it won't
boot to the OS.  Put the floppy back in and it boots fine.

In the second scenario, if I put the other two HDD's in the system after
the install it boots fine until I modify the fstab file.  I add the two
drive into fstab ( /dev/hdb and /dev/sda  both set to ext2 and then
settings of 1 and then boot sequence).  I can then fdisk the IDE HDD and
I think I was able to fdisk the SCSI one once.  Upon reboot, I get an
error saying that /dev/sda? doesn't exist.  It will let me continue on
with single user mode and I can do basic functions, and also can do
fdisk on the two IDE drives.  If I try to fdisk the SCSI, it says
something about procedure doesn't exist or some such thing and then it
goes into funky command line mode.

I've been wracking my brain on this for the past few days, and can't
figure out what's going on.  The fist machine is going to be my
DNS/DHCP/print/dial-in/file storage server.  The second machine will be
my firewall.  I haven't tried on my second machine as that I need to
install from the network, but I'd assume I'd run into the same scenario
as the first.

Any help on this would be appreciated.  Could someone either explain to
me the procedure to add in new HDD's to a machine properly, or what I
need to do to get my system to boot successfully of a HDD instead of a
floppy.


Shawn