Thanks goes out to all who responded to my plea for help. After reading everyones mail and falling back to a phrase we use in the Military "when all else fails, read the instructions!" I have my P90 back up and going again!
I checked out my boot directory and found the following files: boot.0300 boot.0301 boot.0341 The date on boot.0300 was time stamped with the time I had a brain cramp and executed lilo on the wrong machine. I felt pretty confident that issueing /sbin/lilo -u /dev/hda would take care of the boot sector. I ran the above command and all went well! Now came the time to repair the damage done to /dev/hda1. The time on boot.0301 looked like the time I tried to make the most of my mistake and get lilo to boot my linux partition on /dev/hdb1, except I fat fingered my lilo.conf and set boot=/dev/hda1 which messed up some partition information I guess. Next I ran /sbin/lilo -u /dev/hda1 I got a message saying that the time stamp of the file didn't match the time stamp written to /dev/hda1 and told me to use the -U option if I knew what I was doing! By now I have nothing to loose. The time stamp looked good on boot.0301 so I took a bet that this contained the status of /dev/hda1 before I started mucking around with everything trying to get lilo to boot linux on /dev/hdb1. I went for it and ran /sbin/lilo -U /dev/hda1. Several messages displayed saying that the records were restored ... said a little prayer and hit CTRL_ALT_DEL. I never thought I'd be so glad to see the words Starting MSDOS! My hat goes off to the people who are in charge of the lilo program. I did not use dd to back up the contents and I am glad that lilo saves the FIRST change of a device to a file for you! Now I understand the importance of doing this with dd and I have learned a great deal in this experience! I would not have cared if this machine was not my machine at work. We have some software on here that our IT dept. is in charge of and they would have had to come in and wipe my disk clean and reinstall their "standard client" software and charge our group bucks to do so. Not to mention that I (a Software Engineer) would have to explain how I did such a foolish thing. Thanks again to all who responded. If any of you come through Lynchburg Virginia send me e-mail and I owe you lunch! Now I just have to figure out why the kernel I built (which got me into this mess) can't find the root file system ... Thanks again, Brian p.s. sorry for talking so long. I'm just very thankful that everything turned out well. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
