When things go wrong, there are several ways to work on fixing them. However, they require that you understand the system well. This manual can't teach you what to do, but we will present the ways that you can use our products to get into rescue modes where you can use your own knowlege to rescue the system.
If your system boots, but does not allow you to log in when it has completed booting, you can use the single or emergency boot option. At the LILO boot: prompt, type linux single in order to boot in single-user mode. In single-user mode, your local filesystems will be mounted, but your network will not be activated. In emergency mode, almost nothing will be set up. Only the root filesystem will be mounted, and it will be mounted read-only.
The installation floppy set can also be used as a rescue disk set. When you boot the boot floppy, type rescue at the boot prompt (on non-Intel platforms, add rescue as an option to the kernel you are booting, for example, linux rescue), and the install process will ask a few questions, request that you insert the second disk, and set up shells on VC 1 and VC 2. The shell that is running is ash, a minimal bourne shell with no history or command-line editing.
The PATH environment variable is set so that once you have mounted your root partition on /mnt, binaries from your root partition will be run if they do not exist on the floppy. Also, the libraries in /mnt/lib and /mnt/usr/lib will be used if needed. You may wish to change your PATH to not include /bin and /usr/bin, leaving /mnt/bin, /mnt/usr/bin, etc., while you are working on repairing your system. If you do that, you will need to use /bin/umount to unmount /mnt.
Limited versions of important utilities are available before you mount /mnt:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt -t ext2is functionally equivalent to
mount sda1 /mnt