What I do when I foul up my lilo config (and I've been fairly successful at doing so a few times) is booting to the install cd of my favorite distro (Slackware). From there I'm able to mount the root partition, edit [mountpoint]/etc/lilo.conf, and run lilo using chroot. The most important part of this for you, I believe, is the necessity to use chroot to change root to the place where the partition was mounted. Example:
Code:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
cd /mnt
vim /mnt/etc/lilo.conf
chroot /mnt lilo -v
cd /
umount /mnt
(Reboot)
I'm not sure what your initial lilo troubles were, but this is how I go about editing and installing a new lilo config when the old one is roached. Good Luck!!
-TomaCzar