Sherpa Posted June 5, 2004 Report Share Posted June 5, 2004 (edited) I have had this error several times before, i remember that it always happened after i shut down the computer. when i went to boot up the computer all i got was a message that said L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99.... i guess i am just wondering what causes this error, each time i powered off the computer it was done correctly , there was no power serge, and the computer powered down itself. I also have a American Power Conversion Back-up battery (un interruptable power supply) and serge protector to further protection. the first time this happened to me was when i was running my Winblows hard drives, and it crashed, and had to be shut off by holding the power button down for 5+ seconds. At that time i was a noobie, and when i switched the boot order in my bios to boot from my linux drive i received this error. [At this point i think i should explain a little bit about my hardware configuration on my computer. I have 2 80Gb hard drives that have winblows on them ( they are in raid 0 configuration an my onboard raid card) i have an additional two hard drives on my computer they are both regular ide hard drive configurations. i have a 250 GB hard drive that has a 32 GB partition ( that is of FAT32 format) so i can share files between my linux drive and my Win Hard drive. Then for the other IDE hard drive it is an 80 GB drive that has a 32 GB (FAT32 partition) for the same purpose as the other FAT32 partition (linux storage and sharing to windows), and on the rest of that hard drive i have linux installed. I did this in order to prevent cross contamination between my linux drives and my Winblows (i have to reformat WInblows on a regular basis). So anyway the way i choose between windows and linux is to change the boot order of my devices in the bios settings. If i want to boot to windows, i choose to boot from the Promise raid device, and if i want to boot to linux, i will choose to boot from the 80 GB IDE hard drive. ] Now back to the first time i received the lilo error. So i was in windows and it crashed as it usually does and i had to do a hard power off. So i was tired with fooling with windows and i wanted to boot my Mandrake 10 CE hard drive, so i switched to boot order, i saved the bios settings and it restarted, then i noticed that i got this error. Being a noobie i thought that i had fatally destroyed the OS, and i concluded that the only way to fix it was to reformat and reinstall, so that is what i did. To make an even longer story short i reinstalled mandy 10 CE, the OE came out and i reformatted and reinstalled Mandy 10 OE and everything was working fine... Until there was a storm one night. I shut down by computer from mandy ( it shutdown with no problems) then i powered off everything, switched the powersupply switch on the back of the computer off, unplugged it, and shut the backup battery off. ( i am very protective of my computer equipment) The next morning i went to boot up everything when i noticed that Mandy 10 OE had now given me the same error. i tried using the rescue disk to reinstall the bootloader. (i was told to restore the MBR off of this discussion board, but i never figured out how to do that) but then i did some googleing and found that someone had fixed it by resetting their bios settings to default. i did this and sure enough mandy 10 booted up with no problems. i am just wondering what could have caused this failed boot up on these two occasions?? [moved from Software by spinynorman] Edited June 14, 2004 by Sherpa Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherpa Posted June 12, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 12, 2004 bump Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liquidzoo Posted June 12, 2004 Report Share Posted June 12, 2004 On your first occasion; if you switched the boot order in the bios so it would try to boot off of a different hard drive first, that might have caused the error. Other than that, I'm really not sure. I've only had this error twice, and both times were back in the 7.0 and 7.2 days, before I knew much about anything as far as Linux was concerned. I reinstalled both times. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spinynorman Posted June 12, 2004 Report Share Posted June 12, 2004 This is an extract from man lilo: BOOT ERRORSThe boot process takes place in two stages. The first stage loader is a single sector, and is loaded by the BIOS or by the loader in the MBR. It loads the multi-sector second stage loader, but is very space limited. When the first stage loader gets control, it types the letter "L"; when it is ready to transfer control to the second stage loader it types the letter "I". If any error occurs, like a disk read error, it will put out a hexadecimil error code, and then it will re-try the operation. All hex error codes are BIOS return values, except for the lilo-generated 40, 99 and 9A. A partial list of error codes follows: 00 no error 01 invalid disk command 0A bad sector flag 0B bad track flag 20 controller failure 40 seek failure (BIOS) 40 cylinder>1023 (LILO) 99 invalid second stage index sector (LILO) 9A no second stage loader signature (LILO) AA drive not ready FF sense operation failed Error code 40 is generated by the BIOS, or by LILO during the conversion of a linear (24-bit) disk address to a geometric (C:H:S) address. On older systems which do not support lba32 (32-bit) addressing, this error may also be generated. Errors 99 and 9A usually mean the map file (-m or map=) is not readable, likely because LILO was not re-run after some system change, or there is a geometry mis-match between what LILO used (lilo -v3 to display) and what is actually being used by the BIOS (one of the lilo diagnostic disks, available in the source distribution, may be needed to diagnose this problem). When the second stage loader has received control from the first stage, it prints the letter "L", and when it has initialized itself, including verifying the "Descriptor Table" - the list of kernels/others to boot - it will print the letter "O", to form the full word "LILO", in upper-case. Hope this helps. :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherpa Posted June 12, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 12, 2004 ok well now is the perfect time to try toi fix this, it has happened again, where is this LILO diagnostic disk? also how do i restor the MBR? di i need to go into windows and format that partition of the linux drive? then put in the mandrake disk and reinstall it? or what do i do? I hope there is an easier way than this, but i will do it if i have to. BTW this time i tried reseting the bios to default, and it didnot fix :( so any help/suggst... would be very good!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted June 12, 2004 Report Share Posted June 12, 2004 Boot with cd1, hit esc at the splash, and type "rescue". You will be presented with a menu. I always restore and the reinstall lilo, rather than just reinstalling lilo. I also keep a copy of lilo.conf in my /home directory, because it is custaomized and I don't want to reinvent the wheel. So, if I need to, I reinstall and then copy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherpa Posted June 13, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 13, 2004 ok, IX, when i got to the splash screen, hitting ESC did nothing... but there was an option that said press f1 for more options, so i did, typed rescue, and a list came up, the only option that i had though was to reinstall Lilo, i did not have an option to restore it, i am using Mandrake 10 OE, PLEASE HELP!!!!!!! :( i am getting withdrawal symptoms.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted June 13, 2004 Report Share Posted June 13, 2004 :D Sorry, I said esc, but of course it is F1. I will look at the menu (Haven't seen it in a while) but it may say restore windows boot sector, rather than mbr. Or it might say restore master boot record. I'll check it out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherpa Posted June 13, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 13, 2004 yes, it does have a restore windows boot loader, what exactly does this do? i have read somewhere that you can reformat the mbr, then try to reinstall it.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherpa Posted June 13, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 13, 2004 it is worse now.... after i did the restore and reinstall, it now doesn't recognize that drive as a bootable drive :( :( :( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted June 13, 2004 Report Share Posted June 13, 2004 (edited) I installed another/second/slave hd copy of xp last night next to mandrake, before it actually. So this of course changed partition numbers, but no worries I use PM8 and it changed fstab for me The problem for me is that I put grub on the bootsector of / (hdb9) and leave the ntldr in the mbr and boot the diff os's with the ntldr. http://www.mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=11887 What this partition table change does is 99 invalid second stage index sector (LILO)for lilo and'--boot-drive=DRIVE' Set the stage2 BOOT_DRIVE to DRIVE. This argument should be an integer (decimal, octal or hexadecimal). for grub (SEE: info grub) Why this happens to someone that hasn't made a change to the partition table I have no idea, but it happened to me last night. Grub doesn't like being changed from rescue mode which is probably the only reason it's still not the default for mandrake. To fix it you have to be a grub expert and do it from the grub shell. Well I've screwed everything up in the past trying that and since it was 2:30AM I went with lilo The last place lilo will ever be on any machine I control is the mbr, so from rescue mode I put it in / (hdb9). chroot /mnt vi /etc/lilo.conf (and change boot=hdb6 to boot=hdb9 and also edit the other entries) lilo -b /dev/hdb9 then for the ntldr I did dd if=/dev/hdb9 of=bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1 mv -f bootsect.lnx /98 (my win98se/first primary partition where xp puts all it's ntldr stuff and where the boot.ini is) I rebooted and "cool! it worked! time to sleep". Woke up this morning and thought "hey, now that I have xorg instead of XFree86 maybe the frambuffer will work right". So I changed the /boot/message, splash=option and vga=option in lilo.conf>ran lilo -v>rebooted to get....you guessed it l 99999999999 crap! Stupid lilo! I'll use 'windows_only' before I ever attempt to screw with that alpha software ever again! So, back to rescue mode chroot /mnt lilo -U lilo -b /dev/hdb9 dd if=/dev/hdb9 of=bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1 mv -f bootsect.lnx /98 and it worked, again when I got back into mandrake I uninstalled lilo and installed grub with; grub-install '(hd1,8)' dd if=/dev/hdb9 of=bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1 mv -f bootsect.lnx /98 and I finally have grub back. Lilo can't work for one day? Not one day! It's only good for use in rescue mode to get you into mandrake to switch to grub Edited June 13, 2004 by bvc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherpa Posted June 14, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 14, 2004 (edited) well i cant even get it back into mandrake, i cant even get it to load..... i dont understand, i did the restor the windows boot loader then i did reinstall LILO, and i still get that stupid error if i dont get back into mandrake soon i liable to break something!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Is there any other way of doing this, i tried to do a Mandrake install, but i just did the update... but it said something about root partition not found, but i know that it is not wiped b/c i mounted it under the rescue and i was able to see everything sooo..... should i go into windows and format the medium sized partition? there is one really small one, the swap, then the medium sized one, the MBR and the large one, The root, right? Edited June 14, 2004 by Sherpa Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted June 14, 2004 Report Share Posted June 14, 2004 I'm not sure what your configuration is. The "mbr" is a record, not a partition. It is not a visible thing under most tools, unless you have a specific tool that will show you a sector map of your hard drive. A good basic linux set up would be /, /home, and swap. Do not make a /root partition, or a /boot partition. Notice that the "/" symbolizes the "root" partition. Swap would appear as a small partition, and / or /home might appear large if Mandrake did an autoconfigure. Editing files is a blessing and a curse. You can fix your system, and you can render your system inoperable. I have caused the greatest damage to my system while doing what I thought was the right thing. The fact that Mandrake can't find a / is quite disturbing. You will end up reinstalling. Note that I said "install". Upgrades are nothing but problems. Sorry if I don't have any good news. I hope I'm wrong. :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherpa Posted June 14, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 14, 2004 ok well you have at least cleared up some stuff for me... i have not erased anything yet, so maybe i will be able to do something, i dont know what that mandrake install thing was saying.... hopefully it was lying.... i am doing some music work with itunes in windows now, so for the next couple of days i am going to be pretty cautious with what i do to my computer, i dont want to erase the harddrive that i am saving all of this music on, that would be very bad... so ill try to see if i can do anything in the next couple of days... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sherpa Posted June 14, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 14, 2004 oh and, i dont know if bvc already answered this, but i guess that GRUB does not do stuff like this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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