Thanks to all who replied. Here's what I did in the end (not having a rescue disk and being too ashamed to admit it)...
Downloaded Tom's Root and Boot disk http://www.toms.net/rb/ Booted using tomsrtbt and since I had no concrete idea what the partition table looked like (head once more bowed in shame), I mounted each of the partitions under /mnt to find out which one was the root filesystem. Tried to run lilo (/mnt/sbin/lilo -v -v) but got a file not found error. Scratched head and looked confused. Rebooted the system, and passed root=/dev/hdax to tomsrtbt. It happily booted my system, apart from some errors which I assumed were due to the 2.0 series kernel (I run 2.4.2). Ran lilo very verbosely (lilo -v -v), saw it pass with no errors. Rebooted system. Joy! Many thanks to all those who made suggestions (which were no doubt extremely relevant to sensible people who keep rescue disks/cds, and know which partition is which on their system -- I shall endeavour to become one of them). Cheers Tiarnan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices http://auctions.yahoo.com/
