Bootloader Trouble

[LoserWithCause]

I just installed Slack 10 on my laptop, it's dualboted with XP. I think I screwed up the bootloader (I thought I installed LILO) because whenever I turn on the computer, I'm presented with a grub> prompt. How can I boot into windows or linux (preferrably both)? I don't think I'm that screwed, but it's got me worrying...

[U-Turn]

It sounds like you've had RedHat/Fedora, SUSE or another distro that uses GRUB as a boot loader installed on that system previously. Also, I'd bet you installed LILO to Slackware's default location, the superblock of your / partition.
Installing LILO to / isn't a problem but you'll need to set that partition as the bootable partition. To do this, just boot from your Slackware installation cd and, once you're at the root prompt(#), run cfdisk and change the boot flag from /dev/hda1 to your / partition.
You could also change the location of LILO to the MBR. I'll explain that later if needed.

[LoserWithCause]

well, I did what you said, and I still get a grub prompt. What can I do to be able to get LILO to load and have it let me boot inot either Slack or Windows???

[U-Turn]

First, you need to boot in to the installed system. To do that, pop in cd1 and at the boot prompt enter

boot: bare.i root=/dev/hda1 noinitrd ro

Of course, change /dev/hda1 to suit your installation.
Once the system is booted and you're logged in to the root account, run liloconfig to re-install lilo. This time, instead of accepting the default install location, choose MBR. Everything else is answering the questions as they're asked.

[LoserWithCause]

WORKS GREAT!!! Thanks so much u-turn! I thought about installing to the MBR during origional install, but I didn't want ot loose Windows just yet, and it said "possibly unsafe" so I went with the default...but it's fixed now!!!