This is the error displayed by LILO upon booting:
"Loading failsafeEBDA is big, kernel setup stack overlaps LILO second stage."

Machine of course hangs there.

This is SUSE 10.3 installation that worked fine until (perhaps) the boot loader read info on (or tried to boot) a NTFS USB external drive left on by mistake.

Distro is located on a 320 GB serial drive, three partitions 2 GB swap ,20 GB root and the rest home partition.

Any ideas as to how to correct this?. Thanks in advance.

Only one other person has had a problem anything like this...
http://sysadminforum.com/t71478.html
... solution was to rerun lilo

boot from install media - enter rescue mode.
mount the root partition to, say, /mnt.

enter "lilo -r /mnt"


soooo.... did openSUSE not give the option to install GRUB?

Well...yes..I had the opt' to install grub but the reason to install LILO in the first place was that I had so many incidents like this with grub, that I felt like trying something new.

It's amazing that the boot loader get so confused after a minor change to the available hardware, in particular, when it's not even part of the booting sequence.

In the past, under grub I fiddled with menu.lst and device.map to no avail. I tried booting off the (internet install) CD and was looking for a way to install a different boot loader to force the system to recognize all drives again, but no such option became available.

Will try what has been suggested (with my fingers crossed...).

Once again, thanks for the advice.

Well... in lilo, you are expected to rerun lilo each time you change something important.

The only reason the bootloader would attempt to read the external drive is if you told it to look for the /boot partition there. Did you?

This dosn't faze grub, you just have to edit menu.lst to show the correct drive. Suspect your problem in in front of the kbd - these configs can be confusing. Perhaps you could use a few pointers?

Put some live CD, in the Console:
#grub
> find /boot/grub/stage1
> root (hd0,?) [doesn't need to be hd0, it depends]
> setup (hd0)

that should work

achieving what - exactly?

Quoting a bit of what you are replying to helps. Considering OP is using LILO.