I was using 0.98.1 and had some wierd problems pop up where the
kernel would print out lots of errors dealing with free_block and free_inode,
and as one might expect, after that fsck reported gobs of errors, most of
which it fixed. Unfortunately, over time this and some other major problems
due to people not syncing my machine before turning it off caused the minix
filesystem to be irreperably damaged, so I figured that now would be a great
time to convert to using the extended fs and LILO, after all, I figured, they
are stable now, no major problems, and they have been around for a while.
Well, it looks like I really figured WRONG.

        I copied the binaries from the efsprogs 7 pack to my HJ bootable
rootdisk and tried to make an extended filesystem, but always got core dumps
when I ran mkefs. Eventually, I decided to try doing it from the (still 
damaged) minix fs on my drive, which I did seemingly successfully. But when
I booted the bootable rootdisk, I found that the newly created filesystem
did not have the correct magic numbers, so it didn't mount. I decided that
I had no choice but to go back to using the minix fs, but I could still use
LILO, right? WRONG.

        I followed HJ's instructions and put the LILO bootstrap sector into
my MBR figuring that I could use LILO to select partitions to boot in some
way. When I rebooted, I noticed that it started grinding the floppy drive-
even though the boot loader was on my hard drive, it wanted a filesystem
on a floppy disk to get a kernel from. After booting this, it mounted my
hard drive as a root partition. I am not, of course, about to use a floppy
disk to boot every time, so I decided to cut my losses and try using 
shoelace. I mounted my DOS partition, read shoelace's binaries in, and
ran laceup, and it couldn't get the current directory, thereby making itself
useless. Shoelace doesn't work now. (At least not laceup). I tried restoring
the winiboot MBR that LILO saved by putting that filename in instead of
boot.b, rebooted, and now my system boots from hard drive, prints "LI", 
accesses the floppy drive, then STOPS. The HJ bootable rootdisk has, also
decided not to boot anymore. So I'm rather stuck.

        So, the following questions:

        1. How can one use HJ's bootable rootdisk to make Linux boot like
                shoelace. No floppy access, partition selection of some
                sort, no crazy stuff. LILO has been nothing short of
                arrogant in my dealings with the program, but it doesn't
                look like I have much of a choice anymore.
        2. How can one create an extended fs partition from a (modified)
                HJ rootdisk? I did copy libc.so.2.2 to the rootdisk and
                made the appropriate links, so it's not shared libraries
                that is the problem. 

        Any help would be greatly appreciated, but please respond directly
or by CC in email for speed. Thanks.

                                                        -Craig