Go ahead and laugh at me

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I had just finished compiling my kernel and modules, everything was fine. I had my vmlinux-2.4.12 in /boot, lilo.conf was fine, I ran lilo and that went fine, I tried to boot my new kernel and nothing, just: Loading new2......... {the name I gave in lilo.conf} and that was it. I figured that the problem was with the 1024 cylinder thing, tried both linear and lba32 in lilo.conf and neither worked so I figured that since /boot was on its own partition my new kernel was somehow outside the 1024th cylinder, I moved some stuff around and recopied my kernel to /boot, still nothing. --Here's the funny/dumb part-- Remembering making a boot disk with dd if=xxxx of=yyyy I thought I'd give it a try. So, I did dd if=./vmlinux-2.4.12 of=/boot, got an error and tried dd if=./vmlinux-2.4.12 of=/dev/hdb1 VERY NICE!!! did ls -la /boot ... 0 Files, maybe it will be there if I reboot ... nope! Good thing I have a boot disk. Now the question, How do you recreate /boot? I have my kernel which should work if I could get it into the right place and this huge kernel that was there from the installation stored in other locations besides /boot. But what about all the System.map and message files? Any help would be great. Consolation welcome. Thanks.

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Let's just fdisk and start over from the beginning.

[furrycat]

Boot with the boot disk. Mount your disks (assuming you didn't wipe out the filesystem - try the sb option to mount...) and reinstall whichever package lilo comes with, eg lilo.tgz on Slackware.

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Well, running rpm -Uvh lilo.whatever.rpm, then lilo, restored the files to the /boot directory. I think I left off some vital information though. When the kernal is loading it goes through all the filesystem checks, says that there was a problem with /boot, performs fsck, passes then gives another error, LABEL=/boot not found. So, what I think is the problem is that my /dev/hdb1 had a label /boot on it and when I did my little dd it got rid of the label. So now, how do you assign a label to a partition?

[furrycat]

I think you can use fdisk to do that.

I really don't know why Red Hat decided to use labels in their /etc/fstab. It makes system recovery a pain because you have to find out the right label and then issue a proper mount command.

Typical Red Hat. It looks nice but it's more hassle than it's worth.

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I read through the man pages for fdisk and cfdisk, but neither mention anything about setting a label. cfdisk is a nice interface and you can do well to set up new partitions that way, but not a whole lot for established ones. Is there a way to run disk druid without going through the install/upgrade again?