Quoting Peter Olson (peabo@???):

> > On August 9, 2016 at 1:52 PM Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:
> >
> > GRUB is a capable and flexible bootloader, but practically all of the
> > reasons commonly cited for it being preferable to LILO boil down to "I
> > once messed with my boot files before reading LILO documentation, shot
> > myself in the foot, and therefore blame LILO."
>
> Of course, it is difficult to shoot yourself in the foot with GRUB ...
> </sarcasm>
>
> I have a machine in that state right now, and rather than try to debug
> it at the Grub prompt, I am just going to reinstall the system. My
> data is all in another partition, so it is really the easiest way to
> proceed.

Seriously, have you considered just booting a live CD, chrooting to the
system root, looking around to find the filenames of the correct kernel
binary and initrd, installing the lilo deb, constructing a minimal
/etc/lilo.conf, and running '/sbin/lilo -v'? It might be the painless
alternative.

Something like:

prompt
boot=/dev/sda
root=/dev/sda1
map = /boot/map
timeout = 50
default = linux
vga = normal

image = /boot/bzImage 
        initrd=/boot/initrd.img
        label  = linux
        read-only