Thanks for the offer, I appreciate it. However, I am now the owner of a fresh install of Mandrake. I needed a fresh install anyways... and being my 3rd attempt at it, I have a cleaner system too. However, if someone else was looking for a way around the "crash and burn" method, I did get a reply from a friend of mine who is quite a bit more experienced than myself. Here's what he suggests:

"You need a linux boot disk or linux rescue disk. Another way, most distributions when boot from cd usually give you a rescue option of some sort. If you get into linux all you have to do is type "/sbin/lilo" and it will reinstall lilo. and yet one more option is to install linux bare with nothing on it onto another partition. When it boots, edit the lilo.conf file and tell it to boot the origional linux partition. Run "/sbin/lilo" then reboot and it should boot into the origional linux then you can delete the dummy version."

With Mandrake, you can simply pop in the 1st cd, hit F1, use the rescue option, and do as above to fix LILO, if you're lucky. Regardless, thanks for the offer once again. People on this forum just rock!