Hi!

Being the stupidest newbie of all, I played around with the fdisk /dev/hda so that the root partition is no longer what my dear lilo boots, and forgot to update lilo. So now i'm in knoppix, trying to load in a revised lilo.conf into my MBR, but the thing is, when i ran something like lilo -C /mnt/hda5/etc/lilo.conf, the thing doesn't work and give me something like "Fatal: Sorry, don't know how to handle device 0xf000"

i guess my question is how can i load in a new lilo.conf so it knows which partition is now the new root, without bein able to get into the system in the first place? please help!

Thanks a bunch!

does liloconfig have any more success?

Open a console and run this:

$ su
<Enter>
# umount /dev/hda5
# mount /dev/hda5
# chroot /mnt/hda5
# /sbin/lilo -v

This assumes your root partition is on hda5, you have edited your /etc/lilo.conf file on hda5 and it is the revised lilo.conf you want to write to the mbr, and you made any necessary changes to /etc/fstab, if any, that may have been required due to any changes in the partition structure on hda.

Note, knoppix mounts all partitions "nodev" and read only which is why you have to unmount the partition that your lilo.conf is on and remount it using the "/dev/hdax" before chrooting to /mnt/hda5 and running lilo from hda5. Also, knoppix has no root password; just doing "su" and hitting the Enter key will take you to a root prompt.

Mount your root partition like this:

chroot into it:

Then run lilo as usual. (just type lilo).

YAY!

thank you for those heaven sent replies!

that chroot was a great trick!

i'm back in my debian box ready to do more damage now

thanks again!