Thank you everybody for your comments. There might be something else wrong here because LILO refuses to start. I decided to mess with one boot sector at the time, so I went with the miniHOWTO on Linux-NT. This means I am using NT bootloader and I added an entry for linux in boot.ini Whenever I try to start LILO, all I get on the screen are the characters LIL- then the computer hangs. I have tried to make a floppy the boot device and I get the same problem. Mandrake partitioned the HDD (hdc, 22GB master, on the secondary IDE controller) as follows: hdc1: /boot (9.5MB) hdc5:/ (1.1GB) hdc6:(swap) hdc7:/home (19GB) lilo.conf looks like: boot=/dev/hdc1 map=/boot/map install=/boot/boot.b vga=normal default=linux keytable=/boot/us.klt prompt timeout=50 message=/boot/message image=/boot/vmlinuz-smp label=linux root=/dev/hdc5 append="" read-only other=/dev/fd0 label=floppy unsafe image=/boot/vmlinuz label=linux-up root=/dev/hdc5 append="" read-only The only thing that works is the boot floppy that Mandrake created at installation time. My question is: What does it mean when LILO only gets to LIL-? any and all help will be greatly appreciated. Jaime
