I was just interested if anybody could tell me if you can 'read' this information, if you can tell me something about it ...

This is text copied from a console when I typed less "-f /dev/sda". You can see that I installed lilo, but is there anything else you can tell about this info, or how should you read this?


<FA><EB> ^A<B5>^ALILO^V^E<E5><86>HB^@^@^@^@<E5><86>HB<FA><A8><F3>@^A<80>`^E^X<A9>^@<B8><C0>^G<8E><D0><BC>^<FB >



These characters are after the boot sector.

^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@

No, you can't really make use of less in this case - less is for text files and not for binary data. That is why you see weird characters - because the bytes don't correspond to printable ASCII characters.
What you are trying to do is reading the raw harddrive. The first thing on the harddrive is the MBR and the boot sector etc, so that's why you see LILO.
If you want to look at the data use a hex editor.

Also, this is hardly a hardware problem, you should post in another category next time.