After installation, my test machine failed to reboot. The bootloader printed only "LI".
A quick look at the LILO user manual "troubleshooting" section revealed that this indicates a geometry mismatch. The BIOS had been set to "auto" detect, but for some reason, rather than using "LBA" mode geometry, it set itself up to use "LRG" mode.
Since LILO must use the BIOS to access the hard drive while pulling the Linux kernel into RAM, and the BIOS routines had a different idea of the drive geometry calculations than the partitioning tools and boot loader installer had during installation, the computer could not be booted.
I simply went into the BIOS configuration screen and set the drive geometry to "auto,LBA", and it was able to boot right after that, with no reinstall required.