unable to boot system! Why?

[Adam Myrow]

Did you run fsck on your partition from the rescue disk?  Since you gave
it a rather abrupt power-down, it probably needs to be checked and fixed
if possible.  Start with "fsck -p /dev/hda2" where you put in the correct
partition name.  If you have more than one partition, check them all.
This instructs fsck to fix anything that is safe to fix without causing
data loss.  If it exits with an error, you are going to have to run it and
answer "yes" to the repair questions by hand, but there is a high
possibility in this case that something has gotten damaged somewhere and
it will be restored to a file with a garbage name in /lost+found.
Assuming you can repair the damage to the filesystem, try to boot the hard
drive from the rescue disk.  Better still, did you make a boot disk when
you installed?  You should try to boot that once you've run fsck.  If you
can get into the system from the boot disk, you may be able to re-run
Lilo.  BTW, you probably shouldn't have copied the lib directory from the
rescue disk as it's likely somewhat incomplete and you may end up
reinstalling libraries.  I'd sure love to know what crashed on you.  Did
you see a process called updatedb by any chance?  If so, it's best to let
it run its course.  It's a package that often gets installed by default
that indexes all the files on your system and lets you locate a file
quickly from that index rather than having to do a full search of the hard
drive.  You can say something like "locate lynx," and it will look in the
index and tell you where lynx was at the time of its creation.  Most newly
installed systems have updatedb run from cron daily.  Redhat, and possibly
Debian, have something called anacron which will run missed cron jobs.
Hope this helps.