When I boot into Red Hat 9 on hda1 or knoppix 3.7 on hda7 I get a message on during boot that modules 2.6.8.1-10mdk cannot be loaded-no such file or directory.
The OS will boot but there seem to be some problems, especially with RH9. I seem to have worked out most on knoppix. RH9 has multiple major problems that I don't seem to be able to figure out. Here they are:

1. It says that there is no soundcard detected but it has detected it because it gave me the name of it, it can't start it so the OS will continue with no sound. It is an i810 Intel ICH2 AC97. It works fine with kanotix,knoppix, and Mandrake. I just would like to know how to get it working correctly.

2. My printer is unable to get configured. HP Deskjet 845C. There error there is that there is no printer found. I did try to configure it manually with no luck. It is a usb printer that uses CUPS.

3. Cannot establish any type of internet connection. Again, tried on more than one occasion to set it up with no luck. Uses a dsl connection on eth0 with an external Speedstream modem. Cannot find this type of setup to configure it from the list of available modem support.

4. How do the upgrades work? I ran the discs to get more packages that I thought might be missing and I ended up reinstalling by mistake with the same result in all these cases.

I didn't have nearly this much trouble configuring all the other OS's I have set up. RH9 is about to be replaced with Fedora Core 3 but I need an entry for lilo to get it to boot. I would like to at least figure out the internet connection to RH9, at least I would be able to get here quicker for more help.

Any help would be appreciated.

It looks as though you are missing a /lib/modules/2.6.8.1-10mdk directory. This would be where almost all of your modules (drivers) are stored.

I'm going to make a wild guess, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. I think the mdk on the end stands for "mandrake". You installed mandrake first, and then you edited your /etc/lilo.conf file to add an entry for Red Hat. Since you did not understand most of what was there, you copied the part that already existed and made a few changes. I think you have a mandrake kernel that is trying to boot a Red Hat installation, and is not finding the mandrake kernel modules (because they are in the other partition).

I'm not real great with lilo. I use grub myself. You should probably post your /etc/lilo.conf file here for us to look at (post the one from Mandrake, I assume that's the one you've been editing and using)

Personally, I would recommend letting each installation have it's own boot loader loaded in it's own partition's boot sector (one of them in the mbr of coarse). It's less messy that way; fewer mistakes and problems of this type.

So when givin the choice to use the bootloader from the distro, I have the option of installing to the mbr or the partition? I haven't seen that during installation. Only in kanotix and Mandrake, that's probably why they boot correctly and the others don't.

Here are the entries in lilo:

default="1.WindowsXP"
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
keytable=/boot/us.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=900
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="2.Mandrake-10.1"
root=/dev/hda4
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=nomount acpi=ht splash=silent"
vga=788
read-only

image=/mnt/hda6/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8.1-kanotix-8
label="3.Kanotix-BH9"
root=/dev/hda6
# initrd=/mnt/hda6/boot/initrd.img
vga=791
append="ramdisk_size=100000 lang=us apm=power-off hda=scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi hdh=scsi nomce alsa noinitrd.img"
read-only

image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="4.RedHat"
root=/dev/hda1
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
vga=788
append="hdc=ide-scsi hda=ide-scsi"
read-only

image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="5.Knoppix3.7"
root=/dev/hda7
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="ramdisk_size=100000 lang=us apm=power-off hda=scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi hdh=scsi nomce alsa"
vga=0x317
read-only

I do notice that a few lines are the same in red hat, knoppix, and mandrake. I tried to get each one to look like the kanotix entry where it has the vmlinuz-blah blah and initrd-blah blah.img, but lilo told me that there was no such file or directory.