Alright, I pulled a bone headed move. I upgraded my kernel and somehow munged the lilo command to update the MBR. In retrospec I think I know what might have happened, but that is of little help now. The system has a SCSI drive for the OS and then an IDE drive for storage. I think the MBR might have been written to the IDE drive, not the SCSI. Anyway here is the background: System: Redhat 7.1 on a Integraph dual PII 300; Symbios logic SCSI controller (sym53c8xx driver); segate 4 GB SCSI drive, western digital 10 GB IDE drive. Using LILO to boot. Root partition is on /dev/sda6. Symptoms: On reboot - system gets to the L in LILO and stops. Using a boot disk fails with a Kernel Panic - init failed - try passing init= during boot. Rescue disk fails with an unspecified error at a blue screen. I think the boot disk I am using is for an older system that was IDE based. Maybe if I can add the sym53c8xx driver to the floppy and intialize it during boot that might help. What I have tried so far: I have tried passing various settings on to the boot disk such as the location of root=/dev/sda6 and also various init commands such as init=/sbin/init or init=/bin/bash but always the same kernel panic. I believe that the major problem with the boot disk is that I am not loading the SCSI driver so there is no way linux can see the sda device. I also have tried rescue mode but it fails to fully intialize and I don't know what is happening there. Any tips on how to get past this? I have googled for solutions but none of the suggestions to data have help me. I have considered putting in another drive and installing linux in parallel and then trying to mount the old disk and fix the problem, but anything I can try before that would be great. Thanks. regards, rotbau _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list