I downloaded and compiled a new kernel, and broke my menu.lst file so that I can't boot into the old or new kernel. Is there anyway short of a complete reinstall to fix this? Thanks

calm down!

you probably have just either made a bad kernel or set your menu.lst up wrong.

in /boot does the kernel image you want to use correspond to the one in menu.lst. If not you need to modify that. If the kernel I would suggest keeping the old kernel in the menu so that you can still get in if the new on is borked. in any event you can use knoppix or similar to repair any damage...

what did you call your new kernel? vmlinuz? or what? please explain the steps you took from the begining

I used the steps on the installationo wiki on this site, but I couldn't get the /sbin/mkinitrd /boot/initrd-x.x.x.img x.x.x to work. It couldn't find certain files in the initrf.img file, which confused me. I looked around, and I think I got caught switching horses mid stream instead of starting over from scratch. Anyway, my computer tries to boot, gets locked up, and defaults to an empty line. It takes and responds to text, but most commands do not work. Exit works, and it tells me about my kernel being in distress because it can't mount my root. I am pretty sure it is because I broke menu.lst or some file it is dependent on, but I can't get to it to edit it. I have a live CD, but I can't figure out how to access my hard drive from it in order to make corrections.

it kind of sounds like you didn't include support for the filesystem that your root partition is mounted on when you compiled the kernel.

Knoppix is dead easy. It mounts everyting. And there is a normal command line....

Is knoppix a live CD as well?

Yes, Knoppix is a live cd.