Using knoppix I get permission denied for device

[Joel Hammer]

 I want to use Knoppix to rescue a lindows installation.
 I have good backups, and have reinstalled the OS from
 disk. Now, I have to untar my backups.

 I hesitate to do this on a running system, since I have
 bad memories of system files being overwriten by such an
 approach and that is not good.

 So, I want to untar these files while running knoppix,
 not lindows.  I need (I think) to run lilo after all the
 untaring is done.

 So, I booted knoppix, chroot'd, and made the necessary
 devices in /dev (hda,hda1,hda3). 

I made the new devices (mknod) as permissive as I can
(chmod 777), and all looks well with ls -al.  They are
block devices.  However, when I run lilo, I get permission
denied for /dev/hda or some such nonsense. /dev/hda is
the boot sector in my lilo.conf.

Any insight appreciated,

Joel