okay this i think is serious cuz i have no idea whats going on.
okay everything was running fine and i shutdown like normal. when i turned it on the next day the boot failed right after it posted the cheching the DMI or something of the sort. it then went on to writing 99s. i dont know wht the 99s mean but i know thats where everything just halted. it had already counted memory and loaded the pci stuff but then hit the dmi thing and stopped.

here is my system specs.( athlon 1.1 and 640 megabytes)

Extracted from lilo man-page:

99 invalid second stage index sector (LILO)

9A no second stage loader signature (LILO)

AA drive not ready

FF sense operation failed

Errors 99 and 9A usually mean the map file (-m or map=) is not readable, likely because LILO was not re-run after some system change, or there is a geometry mis-match between what LILO used (lilo -v3 to display) and what is actually being used by the BIOS (one of the lilo diagnostic disks, available in the source distribution, may be needed to diagnose this problem).
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You might want to check in the BIOS when booting up, for changes in how the BIOS detects or reports on the disks. When the boot strap loader goes to load in the second stage, it isn't there.
This can happen if you added a new hard drive for example, however since this isn't the case, I'm wondering if the drive is disabled in bios or the drive order was changed somehow.

You could boot up with your 1st install disk and enter the rescue mode. (enter the option 'rescue') This will boot you up to linux where the root directory is in a ram drive. Depending on the distro, there may be a menu to mount your partitions under /mnt. There may also be a command to list the hard drive partitions (lspart on the Mandrake rescue mode).

The objective is to get you system mounted as you normally would have it and rerun the lilo program to rewrite the bootloader. After the system is mounted on /mnt, you can use the chroot command to change the root partition from ramdisk to the normal root partition.
chroot /mnt

Next I would restart bash to load in the normal path and aliases.
bash -l

The mount command will display where the partitions are mounted. This needs to be compared with what lilo expects the drive to be.
Compare the drive mounted as the root drive ( / ) with the root= entry in the lilo.conf file.
If they are different, correct the lilo.conf entry.
Run the /sbin/lilo command at this point (even if it seems correct). If lilo detects an error in the lilo.conf file or if a drive in the list cannot be accessed, lilo will complain and you need to correct you lilo.conf file. Sometimes this entails removing an unused stanza.

Make sure that running /sbin/lilo is successful, before rebooting.