i changed the kernal to help with installing a sound card an my system won't boot and i would like to repair or put back in the right kernal which was the 2.4 optimized for pemtium kernal and i was wondering how i can do this?

btw, kernel, not kernal

Do you have a bootdisk? so you can access the /boot partition?
Type ls when you are in the /boot partition and put the output here. What bootloader do you have?

This could be tricky... are you just unable to boot the new kernel or have you screwed the bootloader configuration (i.e. you don't have access to any boot options at all)?

Screwing bootloader with new kernel installations is not so uncommon, and care must be taken so that it doesn't happen. It's not rocket science either, it just takes a little practice to know what you're doing. Basic tip is to check your bootloader config file (/etc/lilo.conf for LILO or /etc/grub.conf for GRUB) after you install the new kernel, just to make sure you have a fallback option in case your newly compiled kernel doesn't work for any reason.

RedHat offers a rescue procedure with the installation cds, which is described here for RH 9. I don't know about other distros, but it is likely they also offer similar features.

HTH

I have the Suse 7.2 and i changed the kernal to help with sound problems and it sits on bootup where linux is uncompressing and loading kernel and just sits their and i can get to a promt with the root and password but im not sure what to do from their.

Wait... does it finish boot properly or does it just hang on the 'uncompressing kernel' step? If you get to a 'localhost login: ' prompt (replace localhost by your own hostname), the boot ended up just fine, you just didn't get to graphical environment (and it probably doesn't have anything to do with kernel configuration).

If OTOH you got stuck on the early boot stages, then you definitely have a boot loader misconfiguration, which was the problem we were discussing earlier, and which might (or not) be hard to solve.

I love Slackware:^) If I ever have a problem like this, I can pop in Slack's first disk, run LILO again, or whatever I want.... It's just a bit tricky for a newbie like me and trying to figure out how everything will work after I reboot since the files won't be in /mnt/*....

It hung around the uncompressing and loading kernal area. What is the defult kernal loaded in SuSe linux and what do i need to get my soundcard to work because. im trying to install the Aureal Vortex 8820 soundcard and it says if i get error messeges load the kernal with sound support and i thought the one i picked would do this and that is why i got to this point but i reloaded Linux from scratch anyway but i don't want this again so anyone know what kernel i need for sound?

Well i figurd out all my problems with linux. I nerrowed it down to the fact that my linux distro was so old that maybe i would have problems with adding or installing software and changing kernals. Ive called SUSE about The 7.2 pro and they told me its to old to change or do anything with it. so im going to mandrake 9 and see how this distro is.