> ahhh... wait.  You mean you you have not written the basic OS to the
> harddrive (ie there is no file system on the disk yet)?

All my hard disk partitions are mounted, as follows:
 dev/ type     Mounted    MB   #Blocks
 hda1 Primary  /boot    8.23   1281 used, 6065 free.
 hda2 Primary  /      123.38   2175 used, 907 free.
 hda3 Primary  /usr  1200.90
 hda4 Extended
 hda5 Logical  /swap   65.81
 hda6 Logical  /home 2319.53
 hda7 Logical  /tmp   148.06
 hda8 Logical  /var   501.75
 hda9 Logical  /work 2130.35

> ... I assume that you were installing it and it died
> in the "make bootable" section which is one of the very last...

Right.  I've failed in the DHCP network setup, and
don't know how to find out what IP address I should
assign for my network cards, but network setup is the
only step I've skipped over.

I've set up network drivers, and there is some config
set up in the /etc directory.  The /boot partition
(mounted under /target at this stage of install)
contains a kernel:
   vmlinuz-2.2.19pre17  1,001,473 bytes
...
   which I suspect is a copy of the file "linux" which
   is on my initial rescue disk with the same size.

> ... run lilo with the load config_file option "-C" and
> force it to write to the boot record.

I can't run lilo; it says this:
 "... the base system must be installed to be
  able to run lilo."

But I thought the base system could be loaded over the
network, to avoid loading base from floppies.

Thanks for your patience.

Vic