Hi. I'm completely new to Linux and installed Debian Woody a couple of weeks ago. everything ran fine, and when Debian Sarge came out I ran apt-get dist-upgrade. The update appeared to run smoothly, however I was unaware that I had to manually install LILO afterwards. When I rebooted my computer I was confronted with just the LI of LILO (a rather common error I gather).

I booted into Knoppix from a cd and searched the net for help. Eventually I found what I was looking for. It seems several people had the same problem as me. Using konsole in Knoppix I issued the following commands:

>su
>mount -rw -t ext2 /dev/hda3 /mnt
>chroot /mnt

ok so far so good, it looked as though I had root access to my files. But when I tried running /etc/lilo, I got the following message:

warning '/proc/pratitions/' does not exist, disk scan bypassed
Fatal: open /vmlinuz:no such file or directory

Great. Later I noticed that there was a file in /dev/hda1 (my boot partition) called vmlinuz. I tried >mount -rw -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /mnt and though it mounted, I could not chroot, getting the error:

chroot: cannot run command `/bin/bash': no such file or directory

So, now I'm at a loss. I don't know which partition to use to run this file, and even if I did, it seems it wouldn't be much of a help. Hopefully there's someone out there who can help me get back my system

Welcome to LQ.

You will need to mount both partitions in the correct place:
You may also want to consider moving to ext3 rather than ext2.

I tried mounting at /mnt/boot and received the following error:

mount: mount point at /mnt/boot does not exist.

And yes upgrading to ext3 has been on my todo list ever since my first fsck

==============================
mount -rw -t ext2 /dev/hda3 /mnt
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount -rw -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /mnt/boot
chroot /mnt
/sbin/lilo
===============================

Thankyou both very much