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This is a highly unusual error. I've never personally encountered this
or heard of anyone else who did on any linux system, so please take the
below advice with that in mind. This is about half guess work.

In alt.os.linux.slackware, Lucinda dared to utter,
> The explanation for the LIL error is:
>
> " LIL The second stage boot loader has been started, but it can't
> load the descriptor table from the map file. This is typically caused
> by a media failure or by a geometry mismatch."

Pat yourself on the back for searching out that answer. Most people
just panic and come screaming here asking what's going wrong with LILO.
Typically when something like this suddenly crops up I expect hard ware
failure. You might want to try testing your hard drive to see if it
performs properly, or at least fsck those partitions.

> When I boot with the Slax live disk, my hda drive is no longer
> recognized. Instead, it becomes /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/.

Since Slax keeps recognizing it as that ide device instead of hda, why
don't you try booting off the slackware installation disk, or better
yet, then live disk (install disk 2) and see what it finds it as?

> When I run /part3/sbin/lilo -v -v from that drive I get:
> Fatal: creat /boot/map~: Read-only file system
> (The last "fatal" error is due to me running the program as "root" on
> the Slax live cd and not as root on hda3).

man lilo. Look for the -r option. Basically you need to run it as a
sort of chroot, so that it honors the hard drive root and not the ram
disk root.

> The output I get from running fdisk -l as "root" on the Slax live cd
> is :

Again, try this with either the slackware install disk or the slackware
live disk. See what you get back.

> Is there some way that I can become
> root on / on my hard drive so that I can change permissions to allow
> me access to files and directories?

man chroot

chroot /path/to/new/root /bin/bash

> I entered the bios settings on my Dell Dimension 4500, but I didn't
> see any information about the hard drive, so I can't tell if there is
> a geometry mismatch or not.

It's been my experience that the little tools Dell sends to test the
hardware are crap, but you might want to use one anyhow to test the
hard drive. If it returns a failure, you know where you problem lies.
Of course, I've had those utilities tell me everything was fine with a
SCSI hard drive that wasn't even spinning, so you're on your own there.

> Any idea what I can try next?

Yeah. Try recreating your device nodes by going into /dev on your hard
drive's root, and deletings all the hda entries, then running the
MAKEDEV script there. I can't gaurantee it'll work, but it's worth a
shot. (Might wanna backup those /dev files before you remove them.)

> Fortunately, I have my system backed up
> to my external hard drive.

There you go! Give yourself a sysadmin point. You should always have
good backups!

- --
It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise,
Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
Ecclesiastes 7:5
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