Dan Davison wrote:
OK thanks a lot for helpful advice (Kent and other two repliers). Knoppix is downloaded and running. One current problem: I haven't got to run lilo under knoppix, because it won't recognise the location of the boot partition (specified as /dev/hda3 in lilo.conf). I have mounted and changed write permissions on the hda3 icon on the knoppix desktop. I used the chroot /mnt/hda5 command as suggested above by Kent. It seemed logical to me that I'd therefore want hda3 mounted at /mnt/hda5/dev/hda3, but I couldn't get that to happen. It seems that knoppix mounts hda3 at the "ramdisk" by default. How do I set things up so that I can record a new boot block according to my modified lilo.conf?
Assuming your / partition is on /dev/hda5, and that it's mounted on /mnt/hda5, then the "chroot /mnt/hda5" should be the proper command. Before running the chroot command, you can type "mount" to see if the root partition is mounted properly. (Don't do anything from the GUI, because it's easier to communicate instructions and troubleshoot when working from the command line.)
Now, from within the chroot'd environment, just run "mount -a", and everything should mount properly within this "system-within-a-system" if your /etc/fstab is correctly configured.
Now just run "lilo", and it should repair your boot partition, assuming everything else is correctly setup (such as the kernel being in the right place, /vmlinuz pointing to the correct kernel, /etc/lilo.conf set up properly, initrd setup properly if necessary (probably not necessary as I believe you're trying to drop back down to a stock 2.2 kernel). If everything is not set up correctly, you'll have to fix those problems first. When you say "boot partition", do you mean your / partition, or your /boot partition? Related, unless you have a separate partition for /boot, it'll be on the / partition, which is assumed above to be on /dev/hda5, not /dev/hda3.
If this doesn't provide enough info to get you fixed, perhaps you should post the contents of your /etc/lilo.conf, /etc/fstab, "ls -l /vml*", and the output of "fdisk -l".
-- Kent