At the end of the install for 5.2 the user is asked where lilo should be installed. I selected Master Boot Record. The write of the loader to the Boot Record failed. I tried and tried to install lilo via the normal install. Eventually I found that the installer had written a lilo.conf file that was too big to be written to the boot sector. So I removed some entries and then ran lilo. I would think that a safeguard would be in place to keep lilo.conf from growing to be too big.
it's not that the lilo entries were too big - it's probably that there was an entry for "dos" in the lilo configuration pointing at a dos filesystem that didn't have a valid boot block on it.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1742 ***