Booting L 99 99 99 99

bjojoi · 01-25-2003, 09:34 AM

I had a WD80 GB disk with windows XP and i recently installed Mandrake 9.0 on a second disk (ATA). my XP disk is Primary Master and my Mandrake disk is Secondary Master. I wrote the boot sector to my windows disk and now i only get L 99 99 99 99 99 every time i start. i made myself a boot disk and this seems to help me get into Linux, but I don't want to have to change diskettes every time i wanna use another os. Do anyone know what L 99 99 99............. means and how i can fix it

spiky · 01-25-2003, 01:45 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by bjojoi
I wrote the boot sector to my windows disk and now i only get L 99 99 99 99 99 every time i start.

I don't know what L99... means, but if you say you wrote the BOOT SECTOR to your windows disk, then you probably corrupted your windows install.

If you can get back into windows with a bootdisk, you first need to reinstall the mbr of your fist disk. I don't know how it works under XP, but on other windows'es you open a console and type 'fdisk /mbr'. This will restore the mbr so you can boot windows.
Maybe you need to reinstall the boot-sector as well, I remembered under win2k it's something like 'FIXMBR' or 'FIXBOOT'. I'm not sure. Get a console and type 'help'.

If your system reboots properly into windows, you can boot into linux with your bootdisk. That's how I do it, too.

If this does not help you, to provide more info about what you exactly did and what you want your config to be.

Chris

Bert · 01-25-2003, 02:10 PM

Boot into Linux and post the output of :

fdisk -l /dev/hda

and we'll see if something can't be done.

bjojoi · 01-25-2003, 07:40 PM

[root@localhost]# fdisk -l /dev/hda
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 9729 78148161 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)

I've seen the L 99 99 99..... message in the startup once before, but that's a long time ago. I managed to fix it back then, but I have no idea what I did. for all i know i could have reinstalled the hole thing. I know it's a LILO thing.

I forgot to mention it in my first post, but L 99 99 99 99........... is shown right after he have tried booting from CD/Diskette/HD. in other words. when it tries to boot from the HD it fills half my screen with L 99 99 99 99 99 99....

When i installed mandrake i used the recomended settings in drakx to make bootsector. i didn't change anything. /dev/hda is where the computer boots and I'm suppose to be able to choose between Windows and Linux

Tell me if you need more infor. i apreciate any help. even if it doesn't work i will learn something :-)

Aussie · 01-25-2003, 09:03 PM

L 99 99 99 is a lilo error message.
From http://user.fundy.net/cyclist/linux/...hoot-LILO.html

Quote:

L ... The first stage boot loader has been loaded and started,
but it can't load the second stage boot loader. The two-digit error
codes indicate the type of problem. (See also section "Disk error
codes".) This condition usually indicates a media failure or a geometry
mismatch (e.g. bad disk parameters, see section "Disk geometry").

We need to see your /etc/lilo.conf and the output of "fdisk -l /dev/hdc".
Primary Master = hda
Primary Slave = hdb
Secondary Master = hdc
Secondary Slave = hdd

bjojoi · 01-31-2003, 10:32 AM

I reinstalled lilo and now it works. I have no idea what was wrong, but at least its working now. It's great to be able to boot into windows. (not that i do)

Bucolic Buffalo · 01-31-2003, 02:09 PM

I think it may be a hardware problem with the Western Digital drive. I recently experienced the same problem. I took a 3.1 gig WD drive from a working Win 2K system and installed Mandrake 9.0 on it. Worked fine. Being short of drives I need to take it and use it in another system and installed Win 2k on it. Fought with the NTLDR error for a while. Fdisked and formated again in FAT and installed Mandrake 9.0 and had the L99 problem. I was Fdisking and formating between installs. All installs could not have gone smoother. But I noticed that the system BIOS recognized the drive, then upon a reboot, no hard drive. It's as if the system is losing communication with the drive.

I had previously had a problem with this same drive and used the WD utilities to regain functionality. I might try that again and put it in an old system and leave it. Or toss it. WD drives have never been very dependable for me in the long term. There must be something about writing to the boot sector that it is having trouble with. I also do not understand why it loses communication with the system BIOS. None of these installs were dual-boot.

Glad you got your system up and going. Keep and eye on it and see if down the road that it does something weird, think about checking the BIOS to see if it's not recognized for some reason.