I managed to get the system to boot with my old potato rescue disk. It seems that lilo was looking for the MBR or something similar in the wrong location. Without putting out any error messages, when I had last run lilo before the problem, it put the boot device to /dev/hda5, an extended partition. I got an error message with dpkg-reconfigure lilo, but not when I ran lilo. A later attempt with dpkg-reconfigure set the boot device to /dev/hda3, which left me with a prompt requesting the location of the MBR every time it booted up.
My system works now (without the MBR prompt), with boot=/dev/hda and root=/dev/hda5. Thanks for any help, Seneca [EMAIL PROTECTED]
