I got it to work! In case anyone is interested, here's what it looks like on SuSE 7.2 with cdrom as hdb and cdrw as hdc: After messing around with manually editing lilo.conf with no luck, I finally used yast2 LILO configuration to make a boot floppy and got the boot parameters right. /dev/ram hdb=ide-scsi hdc=ide-scsi ide-cd ignore=hdb ignore=hdc Or, booting with loadlin, the dos batch file contains: c:\windows\smartdrv/c cd \loadlin loadlin vmlinuz /dev/ram rw initrd=c:\loadlin\initrd root=/dev/hda4 ro hdc=ide-scsi hdb=ide-scsi ide-cd ignore=hdc ignore=hdb Below is /etc/lilo.conf Does the reference "BOOT_FILE=/boot/vmlinuz" in the append line of the global section mean that I'll boot that image regardless of my menu choices? If anyone sees any glaring errors or anything that will kill my computer, please let me know. I guess I should try it. As far as I can tell, there's no difference between vmlinuz and vmlinuz.suse, but I suppose I could replace on with a different kernel. I'm going to send this message before I try rebooting. Greg # LILO configuration file # Start LILO global Section # If you want to prevent console users to boot with init=/bin/bash, # restrict usage of boot params by setting a passwd and using the option # restricted. #password=bootpwd #restricted append="BOOT_FILE=/boot/vmlinuz /dev/ram hdb=ide-scsi hdc=ide-scsi ide-cd ignore=hdb ignore=hdc" boot=/dev/fd0 #compact # faster, but won't work on all systems. lba32 vga=normal message=/boot/message menu-scheme=Wg:kw:Wg:Wg read-only prompt timeout=80 # End LILO global Section # image = /boot/vmlinuz root = /dev/hda4 label = linux initrd = /boot/initrd # image = /boot/vmlinuz.suse root = /dev/hda4 label = suse initrd = /boot/initrd.suse optional # other = /dev/hda1 label = windows table = /dev/hda # image = /boot/memtest.bin label = memtest86