Ladies and gents,

I have found a solution to hanging lilo systems:

L 99 99 99 99 etc.

It is herehttp://linuxathome.com/index.php?p=85
For convenience I've copied the steps here below, in case of broken links. Many thanks go to the original author of the piece.

1. Booted my trusty Knoppix Live Linux CD.

2. Once booted up and ready to go, I fired up a shell (using Konsole, but RXVT, or xterm will do just fine).

3. Made sure I?m root with a 'sudo su'

4. Mounted the root partition of my desktop. E.g. 'mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1'
In my case, I had a separate partition for the boot directory, so I also mounted that. But the boot dir of your desktop should be in the root partition.

5. Removed the boot directory of the Knoppix Live Linux CD. don 't worry, it's a symbolic link to '/KNOPPIX/boot' and you don't really delete anything. It is a read-only CD after all, nothing is ruined. The command was 'rm -rf /boot'

6. I then created a symbolic link to the boot dir of my desktop, rather than to the boot dir of the live linux CD. E.g. 'ln -s /mnt/hda1/boot /boot'

7. I changed into the /etc directory of my desktop. E.g. 'cd /mnt/hda1/etc'

8. Ran lilo on the lilo.conf file located at that dir. E.g. 'lilo -C ./lilo.conf'

9. Unmounted all partitions. E.g. 'umount /mnt/hda1'

10. Shutdown and rebooted the system. All should be well after that.