Lilo & other problems

[Anders Karlsson liv se]

I have some knowledge of NT/2000 but I am kind of new to linux and need some help.
Bought RedHat 7.0 and got started.
 Installed with LILO on MBR and this worked fine but now it fails to boot.
All I can see know at boot time is LI (two first letters) and there it stops.
The first partition /dev/ida/c0d0p1 contains the Compaq configuration utility. I updated this Compaq specific partition and maybe that explains why I have problems. Have a boot floppy though, but it takes a LONG time to boot this way and I of course want to reinstall it on MBR.
Tried lilo command when linux finally started up but that didn't help. / is mounted on /dev/ida/c0d0p5 and /boot on /dev/ida/c0d0p2.
Maybe the bootflag changed?
 Also, I have added a CPU but I guess I have to make the OS aware of it somehow since it does not show in /proc/cpuinfo.
Do I have to recompile the kernel or is this configurable?
If I must recompile, how do I do this to enable both CPU: s?
 Also, should I use the 2.4 kernel instead of the kernel included?
If this is the case what other modules do I first need to update to make it work?
 Also I heard that gcc 2.96 that is shipped with RedHat 7.0 is a nonstable release (?) and that it would be impossible to recompile the kernel with this version anyway.
Is this true and if so how do I "degrade" my gcc version?
 Also, when (if?) I get this working, is it possible to dedicate one of the CPU: s to a specific process?
 Also I got Samba and Apache working perfectly but the linuxconf web interface does not.
Found an update (xinetd-2.1.8.9pre11-1.i386.rpm) that should take care of this but it still fails.
Added the line "disable = yes" to "disable = no" in /etc/xinetd.d/linuxconf-web and restarted xinetd but it still fails.
 Also, how do I set the Interface NIC to 100Mb - full duplex?
The Cisco switches here are strictly configured like this and it does NOT work with auto-negotiate settings on the NIC.
This seems to be the default settings in linux though and changing this setting is a very simple task in NT.
Downloaded source for my NIC (Intel PRO/100) compiled it and, following the documentation included with the source, used modprobe e100 e100_speed_duplex=4 to initiate it.
This works fine, but since I do not know where to add this to make the driver load properly when the system is started, I cannot finish the job.
 As I mentioned I am not a linux wizard so excuse me if these questions are trivial.
Must comment that while I was copying 13 GB of data to this server, a netspeed test towards it gave me a result 50% better then the same test towards my NT4 server.
The NT server was IDLE at the time.
Remarkable.
 Regards
AK