First, after alot of trouble just trying to get the darn thing installed, I finally pulled it off, but I have to boot vector linux from my usb floppy drive which takes about half an hour. SO I was wondering how I would get Lilo to work. First I need to know how I can find out if its installed and configured properlly for booting into windows or linux if I want, as I need to keep windows around until I can get some stuff figured out with NASM. If anyone can give me a check list of sorts for making Lilo boot properly I would be very grateful, and of less importance is the ability to suspend and hibernate. Mostly I need to know how to get it to boot properly so I can shut it down and turn it back on to mess with stuff without having to wait for half an hour.

thanks

PS I don't get a lilo boot screen when I don't have teh floppy plugged in, it just goes strait to windows.

It sounds like your BIOS has a floppy first HD second boot order. Examine /etc/lilo.conf .
Does it show that other OS and Linux ? If you change the location of the bootloader to the hard drive, it should put both selections there and you are in business.
cat /etc/lilo.conf
cat /etc/fstab
fdisk -p /dev/hda
should show what you need to know. The docs for lilo are here:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LILO.html

Essentially, you edit lilo.conf the way you want it. You run lilo and it writes the correct bootloader to the HD to give you the options you need. Likely, you will have a choice of that other OS and Linux.

you don't have lilo installed but vector might have done the necessary setup for you. Check if you have a file /etc/lilo.conf. If you have it, take a look at it. It should have two entries, one for linux and the other for windows. I'm not going to explain it here in detail since there are plenty of threads here where you can find sample lilo.conf files. If it looks all right, you can install it into the MBR with
/sbin/lilo -v
(you have to be root). When you reboot, you will be greeted with the lilo boot menu. If this doesn't work, you can boot from your floppy and use
/sbin/lilo -u
to get back the original setup (w/o lilo).

ok im going to go start up my laptop and give that whirl. Thanks a ton guys