Sounds like LILO is trashed, sure, but so what? Its just for booting.

If you didn't mess with Partition tables, the data's still there, in
hdc2, hdc3, etc.

Boot RH 7.0 or 7.1 off CD in "rescue" mode, and you should be able to mount those partitions and look at them (recovering file if you want), or fix lilo so it will boot what you want. (That's a tad bit more involved, and I'll have to think on it more)

So, LILO's gone from the old 8.4 drive. Buh-bye RH 6.2 installation.

Not if you didn't change anything else, its still there, just not bootable. (or make a floppy boot disk, and then set it so it will change over to the hard drive, or use even that util that lets you boot Linux from DOS. Erm. syslinux? I forgot what it it, but there's a tool that will start up DOS if you can get it on a DOS-formatted boot floppy.

How do I get LILO back on the 8.4 so that it re-recognizes my old RH 6.2 installation?

* Install Linux again, on top of the one you have.

* Run the RESCUE boot, which should give you a minimal shell, and enough to get LILO set back up on the MBR (trying to recall what's involved with that, I did it about 2 months ago)

plan is just to copy the files that I've accumulated on there over the last 6 months of running RH over to my 7.0 installation, and then clearing it. But I did have *some* files I wanted...

If you install 7.0, just mount the other partions.

presuming its hda,
"fdisk -l /dev/hda" (lists partitions, so you can see what you have
"mkdir /mnt/1" (and 2 and so on, or whatever you wan to call them)
"mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/1" (and so forth. Now you can copy from /mnt/1/rodneyssecretstuff to whereever you want.

Can I get LILO to have 3 options -- Winders, RH 6.2, and RH 7.0 (which would boot off my second HD?)

RTFM. :)

Yes. Make differing labels, and point them to different places, sure.

The only "difference" between this 6.2 and 7.0 to LILO is where the kernel and needed code is.

to basically "import" my Winders installation so that I can keep it on the 8.4 drive as is, but run it under Linux. What's the best emulation program that can do that for me?

ADMINS! Please move this to "Oh, Pun!" :)

Nothing that I'm aware of. Probably WINE is your best bet for that. You can try Win4Lin (its got the advantage of using the native filesystem, and you can *try* to copy windows on top of it... but both of those will probably Not Do Very Well with that.

Addison