i was trying to pass some options to lilo and i put them in the global section of the lilo.conf, but now when i reboot i just get a blank screen, does anyone know how to override the options in the lilo.conf? i am really stuck on this one

your best bet would be to put the linux boot CD in and from the install menu choose the rescue option. This should boot to a shell from which you can mount the partitions on your hard disk and then modify your lilo.conf file.

This is what I'd do for RedHat, but if you're not using RH, you should still be able to do the same with other distro's.

i am using slackware, and i tried that bit it just fails to to work

do you see the LILO prompt when your PC boots ?

yeh i do, and i have managed to edit the lilo.conf too, but i just cant find a way to run lilo to rewrite the boot sector tried booting off a knoppix disk and running it that way, but it spews out errors, because it cannot read the files it needs to because the directory structure is different

you need to mount the filesystem from the hard-disk to the appropriate places, so that you can run /sbin/lilo

After booting from a floppy, the procedure is something like:

mkdir /new_root
mkdir /new_root/boot
mount /dev/hda1 /new_root/boot
mount /dev/hda2 /new_root/
chroot /new_root

then you should now be in a root directory (which is actually your two hard disk partitions mounted at /new_root on the filesystem that you have booted to on floppy) and from there can run /sbin/lilo

This is assuming that your "/boot" partition is /dev/hda1 and your "/" partition is /dev/hda2 you'll have to make the appropriate substitutions.

Good luck, its been a while since I had to do this, so don't quote me on any of the above

yeh fixed it, just mounted the / under /new and /boot unser that in boot, and ran lilo, it was a bit messy, but it worked...

cheers mate

I've been using the slackware cd a lot for resque things, simular to the floppy trick above.

When the cd is booted, type

mount /dev/hda... /linuxhd
cd /linuxhd
chroot . (opens a new shell with /linuxhd/ as root)
...type the commands, execute lilo....
exit (exit this chroot-ed process)

reboot