I can't help you here. I don't use LILO. I use grub.
I think your kernel image has loads of stuff built-into it (hence, it's too big to fit on a boot disk). I'm not sure why LILO doesn't want to handle it... but maybe somebody does. I think that's your first line of inquiry.

Failing that, you could try re-compiling the kernel again and this time stick most of the things you want into modules. Select M instead of Y in xconfig for a lot of the stuff you've stuck by default into the kernel. That should shrink the kernel a bit.

Like I said, it took me several attempts at kernel re-compiling to finally get a working kernel!

the only things I enabled in Xconfig were acpi support and I2C sensors. thats it. I dont know why it would be too big

can anyone help me with this? Im lost

You may have only enabled a couple of things, but if you downloaded your source from kernel.org, there is a ton of stuff that is on by default. You really need to go through all the menus and turn off the stuff you don't need. If that doesn't do the trick, compile stuff in modules (but NOT the file system).

The other thing, did you run make bzImage to compile the kernel or something else like make zImage? make bzImage compresses the kernel and can help avoid the too big error

What do you mean by "only acpi support & I2C" enabled?
Enabled as what? Modules? Built into the kernel?

I hope you're not telling me that throught Xconfig everything is marked as N or blank, with the exception of acpi & I2C,... cause there's no way the kernel would boot with only those!

No, i selected Y to ACPI and I2C. How do I know what I need and what I dont need? I did do "make bzImage" to compress it, but im still getting the error message

EDIT: I need the ACPI and I2c loaded in the kernel. Im going to try them as modules this time.

Well, I just did it again, and this is the output of what I did.

Boot sector 512 bytes.
Setup is 2532 bytes.
System is 1225 kB
warning: kernel is too big for standalone boot from floppy

Then, I try to run LILO:

Fatal: open /boot/vmlinux: No such file or directory

So I ln -s to vmlinux, which is in my linux-2.4.22 directory. That went to boot. Tried to run LILO again:

Fatal: Kernel /boot/vmlinux is too big

Any other Ideas?

I suggest you get yourself to the Linux Documentation website and get the Kernal-HOWTO file. That has a lot of info about configuring LILO, as it seems that LILO is harder to config than GRUB is.

As for the kernel... it depends what you want as built in, and what you want as modules. I usually err on the side of leaving most stuff as modules though.

Ok, I loaded a bunch of stuff as modules, enabled ONLY the things I needed, and put "n" for the rest, and its still saying its too big. How can this be? I dont get it, but Im beyond frustrated at this point. Can anyone help me?

I think you need to read the kernal docs for LILO.

It is actually hard with the 2.4.22 kernal to get it under size to be floppy bootable. You'd basically have to rip out support for a ton of stuff, like sound, USB, RAID, etc. Only a bare system would probably manage to be bootable from floppy these days.

Once again, I advise you to look towards configuring LILO, from the kernel HOWTO. I refuse to believe that LILO cannot boot large kernels. There must be some way to do it properly.

Come back when you're booting the new kernel and getting "Kernel Panics"... and prepare to be frustrated further!
(Like I told you, I spend TWO WHOLE DAYS trying to learn how to make a bootabel kernel. Frustration is unavoidable in this line of work!)

I dont understand why it has to be floppy bootable?

I'm not even sure if it has to be with LILO.

I made my kernel too big for floppy, but it had no issues booting under GRUB.

I read the HOWTO on LILO and it said make a bzImage, which Im already doing. That doesnt help me any.

Ok, so here we go. I was missing a step. I forgot to cp mynew bzImage to /boot/vmlinuz. Needless to say, that is now done. The problem now is when I run the check on lilo, I get back the error

Fatal: Kernel doesn't support initial RAM disks

Im finally getting somewhere, but can someone tell me what this means?

Ok, now you're in the "Kernel panic" stages.... we're nearly there.

Basically when you get one of these errors, it means that you've compiled a kernel, but left something important out of the configuration. You know what this means? It means you have to go back, fix the config and recompile the whole darned thing all over again! mua haha haha!

Looking at the kernel panic, it seems that somewhere in your config, you left out support for ramdisks or something. The kernel can't start up without some ramdisk support for drivers and such, and somewhere in the kernel configs, you left this out. At least that's my guess.

go back, make clean, make mrproper, make clean, make xconfig....... try again.