[ale] Linux bootdisk commands

[frank zamenski]

Hi, ALE.

I'm trying to fix a friends new RH 5.0 drive, as for some reason, when it
boots, his Lilo 'loops'. So I put his drive onto my machine as a slave,
booted my RH 5.1 and mounted his on <hda6>/mnt/driveb, and took a look at
his lilo.conf. It looks okay (RH is the only OS on his drive), so I have to
assume he screwed up his MBR by using Norton Disk Dr on it. (I don't know
why he did that, he's new to Linux and likely didn't realize that Norton is
not Linux-savvy -- like, being the newbie *I* am I'm not all that up on it
myself yet, either). Anyway, I put his drive back on the computer as a
master, and figured I'd boot it up with my boot disk, and with
bootdisk.HOWTO at my side, pass a few params to the command line to boot
his, then rerun LILO to rewrite it to the MBR. But, even when passing
root=/dev/hda1 (and I know that's where his root is, altho' he has it
correctly partitioned into hda5, 6, 7, etc for his other filesystems), the
boot mounts root, but fails at "can't read vitrual <don't recall specifics,
but I'm pretty sure it's referring to VM, as in, first virtual monitor>".

I also tried passing vga=ask to it, and picking 80x25. Also a no-go.

I see this as a good diagnostics opportunity. I'm also green, thus baffled!
How do I fix this? :)

Thanks!

Frank Zamenski