questions about grub and lilo

[xiaohuli at alumni.princeton.edu]

Hi,

I was using LILO to dual-boot on windows-xp and fedora.
 I lost the graphical boot screen I used to have under
RH9.  I read somewhere that I need to put 
message=/boot/message in the /etc/lilo.conf file. 
Since I don't have the /boot/message file, in a stupid
move, I create an empty one.  I then run /etc/lilo
and got fatal error message. I removed the added line
in lilo.conf, reintall, same error message.  I wasn't
too worried at this point since I figured I can always
boot from floppy, right ?.  I reboot from floppy and
suprisingly see lilo coming up, it looks like now it is
on /root partition! ?  How could this happen ?

Anyway I decided to use grub.  I created
/boot/gub/grub.conf file, since upgrading from FC1 to
RH9 anacanda did not generate one for me although I did
select to upgrade boot loader.  I guess that is
becausing i was using lilo in RH9.  Anacanda ( I
probably spelled it wrong ) didn't upgrade lilo.conf
correctly either, created quite some chaos for me.  I
run /sibn/grub-install  /dev/hda without removing lilo
as I was told that there is no need, I reboot,   saw
grub graphical screen, choose Fedora, naturally.  Then
it said it didn't found the vmlinuz.<version-number>.  
So I figured I need to boot with floppy , corret
grub.conf problem.  Then the realy tragity happened. 
The machine simple won't boot.  My guess is after
install grub, the lilo who strangely sit on /root
partition got corrupted.  When boot from floppy, lilo
which acts like some later-stage boot loader got load
in and it coundn't do the job.  So now I truely cannot
boot.

What are my options at this point ?  Can I change
grub.conf file under grub ?  How do i do it ?  If I
reinstall Fedora, would it help ?  I am very reluctant
to do something like fdsk /mbr. 

Thanks in advance,

Xiaohu