I've recently updated a laptop and ran into a spot bother with lilo. On boot it gets as far LI.
"No biggy" I think, I'm no stranger to lilo.
but not having any boot floppies handy and the only CD this laptop wants to boot off is my knoppix disc starts to cut down my options.
When I mount the harddisk (read/wright) under knoppix and attemp to run lilo as root I get a permission denied!

Why won't knoppix let me write to my disk?

I guess this is a good for a demo CD but I need to use it as a rescue disk.
I've checked all the device permissions and it all looks writable.
What am I missing?

Are you using chroot, i.e.:

# chroot <mount point for partition where lilo is located>
# /sbin/lilo -v

Actually, I've noticed this not working as well, even in a chroot environment in knoppix 3.3 but it used to work fine in 3.2. You could try the same trick with the partimage rescue cd:

http://www.partimage.org/

Other things to try with knoppix 3.3 - setting a root password in a terminal(Ctrl-Alt-F1), su to root with new password, unmounting then remounting the relevant partition and then do the chroot thing.

Try the SLAX live cd version of slackware. I used it many times when knoppix wouldent work quite right : ).

Well I didn't figure out how to get knoppix to write to the drive but downloading a resuce floppy was no problem.
lilo ran fine - I don't know why the upgrade failed in the first instance.

oh one more thing... lilo has the -r switch to do the chroot bit.