Well assuming your using slax. When you login with root the first thing to do is make sure it mounted your partitions under /mnt. Assuming that its correct then you just do a 'mount -t proc proc /mnt/sda1/proc'. Then do 'chroot /mnt/sda1'. You're now "in" that partition. Now just edit lilo.conf and fstab accordingly changing all references from hda to sda. Then do a 'lilo' and you're done. Just type 'exit' and then 'reboot' and you should see lilo come up and then choose the kernel you want and voila, everything should boot just fine.

oh i see any way of doing this with knoppix 3.9? thats what i tried using but gives me access errors....

Fatal: open /dev/sda: Permission denied

I dont know. The reason I used slax was because It uses a newer 2.6 kernel which means its using the SCSI low level SATA drivers. Thats why it changes it to sda instead of hda. Because the SATA drivers now reside in the SCSI interface branch. If knoppix is recognizing your HD as sda then there should be no problems. do 'cat /proc/partitions' and see whats listed. It should tell you all the device partitions. If no sda listed then it wont work with knoppix. I know slax works though. It's not a very big d/l. 192megs. See the problem is if knoppix doesn't see it as sda then you cant change lilo and have it use sda. It's going to use what the devices are available on the current system. Basicly, lilo isn't going to let you tell it that it should run off HDD device "dkfjkjdf83u" because it's not going to exist. Same thing if knoppix isn't seeing it as sda. Lilo doesn't see an sda device so it's not going to try to install itself to one since it technically doesn't exist.

Oh and I won't be able to reply till later as it is morning here and I just got off work. Sleepy time.

thanks i figured it out for running lilo what i had to do with knoppix was

#mount -o dev /mnt/sda3

#chroot /mnt/sda3 lilo

Wrong...it is a terrible idea to use a 2.4 config on a 2.6.x family kernel.

The only other cause is that you forgot to compile IDE/SATA stuff statically (NOT moduled) into the kernel. Check that out...happend to me a few times too.

Hope that helps

Not only is it a terrible idea but it also won't work. Period. The config's are setup completely different. If you tried to use a 2.4 config you would get never ending errors.

Thank you for all of your replies! I'm sorry that I started this thread and disappeared. Had some family things going on that took me away for awhile (good things mostly). Anyway, I've still got the same problem, however Namaseit's suggestions might have the most promise I think. I will try that later today. Also, will changing all the hda entries in lilo.config prevent my 2.4 kernel from booting?

WooHoo! Namaseit, your hypothesis and proposed fix worked! Thank You!