I'm already waiting for install to finish...and I did do make bzImage...also when I did `make install' at the end it said /dev/hdb1 doesn't have a bootable partition....umm, i never specified /dev/hdb1 anywhere....that is completely un-referenced....i use it as temporary dump space when i'm coding and stuff...only place it should be mentioned is fstab.

so i manually updated lilo.conf because it stopped on that error.

Hmmm. That is strange!

Well, I hope the second round of patches to 2.4.23 go more smoothly. Good luck!

Sorry to see that your quick-fix doesn't seem to be possible.
I guess if the original kernel has been deleted there really is nothing left to do but compile a new one.

Pat yourself on the back for trying your best and not giving up!

It's great to see that so many people tried to help in any way they could.

Sorry for my disappearance I was coming home....
Don't discourage yourself, a full reinstall happened to me too so many times after some disastrous hacking
this is part of the learning curve even though this is the most frustrating one.
Remeber that you can learn more from your failures than from your successes....

and thanks to all the guy involve in this exciting challenge, you are great.

Hehehe BSLack...yeah I know....in the last year I installed Slack about 50 times. The sad part is they were all on the same PC. Which brings me to another question...is there a good backup tool for linux that copies (and compresses of course) free space and used space, but byte-for-byte....like Norton Ghost. and yes, I know Ghost can backup Linux partition types, but I've had bad results (errors) in the past, and anyways, I'm using ReiserFS now. I have also tried PartImage, but had bad luck with that as well as I do not think it backed up my MBR because "no operating system was found" when I booted after a restore. It would really help me so much if a good backup tool existed....or some good documentation on how to backup byte-for-byte (mbr and all) with dd or a similar CLI.