What I want: I may be a bit picky, but I recently installed DOS on a new partition on my hard drive (Mandrake 10.0 on old partition), and had to reinstall lilo. However, it now defaults to a non-existant operating system, and puts linux down below, naming it "old linux" and it calls DOS "windows." I just want to re-order the list so the real linux is at the top, and default, and name it something more distinguished, like, say, Mandrake. Then, I want DOS to be second if possible, and name it "DOS" instead of "Windows." I don't even have Windows on my computer, never have. What I've tried: I'm running Mandrake 10.0, and I have tried following tutorials I found at various sites online, but not only did I have trouble understanding them, but when I worked up the courage to risk taking a stab at it, it turned out I couldn't write to anything in the folders where the files were the tutorials referred to. If replacing my boot loader would help, I would need to be told how to do that without messing up the configuration of my existing operating systems. So, what do ya think? Am I in way over my head?

You can't mess with system configuration files unless you have root permissions (either you are logged in as root or are using something like sudo). The syntax of lilo.conf is very simple but Mandrake has a gui configurator anyway. I suggest you use that since it should also take care of permissions (so long as you can remember the password for root) and remembering to run /sbin/lilo.

how did you "reinstall lilo"? did you man lilo.conf ? in /etc/lilo.conf, the order of the "image" entries determines there order on the boot menu. If linux is first entry, it will be the default OS to be booted. A default=label can override this

I attempted to use the graphical control center, and it said "Installation of LILO failed. The fololowing error occured: lilo failed: Fatal: open /dev/sda1: No such file or directory" I'm the only person who has ever used this computer, and I never intentionally created any other profiles of any kind. How silly of it to not want me to modify my own computer. /sbin/lilo says "Fatal: open /dev/hde: Permission denied" Well, at least I can use my computer even if it is a little inconvenient. BTW, I could probably get it working if I were permitted to edit that conf file, but I know of no way to log in as anyone. It is just by chance, I suppose, that all this time, I've been able to log in as myself without doing anything. %00