I am using red hat 9 ,after having run up2date twice sucessfully twice I have noticed grub keeps entries of the previous versions of redhat. So I tried to edit myboot /grub/grub.conf file only to find that .conf and the file called menu(or something to that effect, are locked and I.m denied permissions. Can anyone tell me how to remove these permissions. I've tried this in a shell as well logged in as root to no avail. If this is not possible is it possible to switch to lilo,forgive if my questions seem silly , I'm only using linux for a few months .

You should be su to edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst

Permissions should be -rw-r--r-- as viewed from ls -l

If not try chmod 0644 /boot/grub/menu.lst