Hi Janina: Wow. What a nice mess you're in. <grin> Well, it would seem to me that you need to append the speakup_ser=1 in your lilo.conf file, but I guess you figured that already. Your primary problem is, of course, getting to it via speech. If you've got something like another computer you can hang off the serial port, you could try logging in as root on the local console and issuing: /sbin/getty -hL ttyS1 9600 vt100 the h is for hardware flow control and L is for local, whatever that means. This should give you a login prompt on the serial port. This will of course be of no use if you don't have a user-level account as debian defaults to not letting root log in this way (you have to su to it afterwoods). I presume you don't have a working ethernet setup or you'dve probably tried this already, though similar restrictions on root logins probably apply here too. The other thing I can think of, short of trying loadlin from a dosbox in windows, is putting in the debian boot disk again and getting speech that way. If I remember correctly, you should be able to alt-F2 to another console and get a bash login prompt. You could then login as root, mount any unmounted file systems (you presumably have to get the installer to mount the root FS first) and do what you need to do before rebooting. Note that I'm only going by what I read in the debian 2.0 install manual and nothing I've said may necessarily apply to the debian 2.2 installer (Gene and Kirk, comments please). That's all I can think of off-hand. Good luck!! Geoff.