I've managed to solve the problem with some perseverance. For anyone who's interested I booted from CD1 : "boot installed system" used Yast "boot config on floppy" to re-create my boot disk, re-booted (from floppy) and got the o/s menu back, modprobe(d) ppa to gain access to my zip drive, extracted my orig lilo.conf from my tar-gzipped backup (of key files), Now all is back to normal ! Thanks for all the help and suggestions, much appreciated. MH