prob with suse
 

Wondering if anybody can help me out please! Had 9.2 installed and installed updates after which a window opened saying "if using lilo bootloader please execute /sbin/lilo after installing the update kernel and prior to re-booting." I know virtually zilch about Linux (but trying my best) and think I have grub bootloader. When I re-booted without doing the above because I didn't think it necessary and don't know how to anyway, my pc didn't boot to a gui as it usually does but a text screen the last line of which was 'GRUB _' However it wouldn't accept any input from the keyboard. Hmmm....what did I do then? Think I rebooted with the suse install disk and went to rescue. Put in the username but would not accept any conceivable Rescue Password. In the end I gave up and re-installed but the '/sbin/lilo' message came up again....Argh! Anyway, it did reboot no problem but I don't know neither how to or whether to (even to if I did ) execute the command. I would really appreciate any help especially if explained (if possible) in simple terms. Thank you in advance for any guidance and my apologies for being inept.

SuSE installs grub as the default bootloader. Lilo is available if you prefer that. Since you didn't make such a selection, let's assume you have grub. Now, how to confirm?
Open your file manager (konqueror in SuSE). Click on the /boot directory to enter it. If you see a sub-directory called grub, you have grub installed.
Now, click on the grub directory. In there, you have a file called menu.lst, which is probably denied access to regular users; only the root user can access it.
Open a terminal window (the icon of a tv screen with a shell in the corner), and give the command: cd /boot/grub
Now, give the command su. When prompted, supply the root password. Then: cat menu.lst. That will show you the contents of the bootloader menu.
In the entry which begins: title SuSE, you see a kernel line, which tells grub where the root of the filesystem is (the partition it's in), and where the boot directory is with the compressed kernel image used on boot.
Your task is to verify that the kernel information is correct.
Example: you have only one linux partition and only one hard disk, no other operating system installed. The disk is hda (in linux terms), the partition is 1. In grub, that's disk hd0, and partition 0.
So, the kernel line would begin: kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1, which tells grub where to find the kernel to boot, and the device file to use when accessing that disk.

You can replace grub with lilo by executing the command /sbin/lilo. However, before you give that command , you'd better write the lilo.conf file (similar to menu.lst, but not generated automatically for you). If you don't have the lilo.conf file when you do /sbin/lilo, you won't be able to boot because lilo has no way of knowing what to do.

Hello,

I am running SuSE 9.0, but I am almost certain that 9.2 also uses the GRUB bootloader. Since this is the case, you will not need to run the command.
The text mode you saw when you booted was probably the GRUB command line. You can still boot from this command line using similar commands that are in /boot/grub/menu.lst by specifing the linux kernel image to boot from.
If everything is working fine now, I would not worry about anything, something may have gone wrong in the previous installation or update. Good luck with Linux.

ta for your prompt replies!
 

Thank you very much indeed bigrigdriver and knoxlinuxuser - I am sooo grateful. I think I am going to have to leave things as they are and see how it goes. Only just learning so any changes are a bit ambitious.....basically I don't know what i am doing at the moment - all new territory but I will study your comments and learn from them.