Initially booted from a floppy running 8.0 and everything was fine. One day it no longer worked and I got a continual string of "1010101010", and couldn't figure out what was wrong. I tried upgrading to 9.1, thinking that would take care of the problem.... "NOT"!! I have been unable to boot. It passes the BIOS portion of boot up then I still get a continual string of "01010101010101".........I can boot up the system from the CD. My hard drive is partitioned as follows:

hdb1 ext2
hdb2 swap
hdb3 Reiser?

How do I get this thing working!! Is it possible (and how) to re-install to get the system to boot without losing data in my home directory, such as
.xxxx files?

Well, I had the same prbl, when my MBR was "broken/dirty" (or may be I had 09090909090090909090... at booting - can't remember). After I cleared it - all's ok. You can clear it by installing winXP (as it clears MBR everytime you install it). If you use lilo (and it was in MBR), then you can type 'lilo' in console - AFAIK, this will reinstall lilo. You can read 'man lilo' for more info, or Linux-FAQ (somewhere in /usr/doc/Linux-FAQs), this FAQ contains topical info about MBR (search for 'MBR' if you don't want to read all FAQ, but I recommend to read it all).

where did you install your lilo?
on the MBR or on the initialization sector of one of the HDs?
because it can be that the intialization sector of the hd where lilo is installed is not active,

you mentioned you had a repetition of 01, maybe you're trying to access a not-supported-by-BIOS disk..

ahhh and you don't need to install winxp to clean you MBR..
you can run "fdisk /mbr" from linux or;
get to the dos prompt from the winxp cd and try "fixmbr"

JoannesX, "chmod 777 WORLD" is COOL!