Lilo Error

kdmstng66 · 12-16-2002, 12:26 AM

When I try to use Lilo I get the error code: L 99 99 99...... . Does any one know what it means. Grub seems to work just fine for me but I would like to find out whats wrong with lilo.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

brainchylde · 12-16-2002, 10:18 AM

get hold of a WIN98 boot disk.... boot from the disk, when you get to the a: prompt, or whatever your floppy drive is - type fdisk /mbr

remove the disk, reboot, should work.

http://www.bootdisk.com/ has the disks, if you so require (i.e - can't get to a windows machine)..

btw - this question has been asked before, so you should try the search function before you answer questions...

kdmstng66 · 12-16-2002, 04:10 PM

If I use fdisk /mbr wont that wipe out LILO all together and replace it with the windows master boot record? I want to be able to use LILO as my boot loader not windows if possible.

Thanks

deesto · 12-16-2002, 05:09 PM

Yes, but it looks like your LILO installation is screwed up, so you'll probably need to do it anyway and reinstall LILO.
"L" means the first stage boot loader has been loaded and started, but it can't load the second stage boot loader. The two-digit error code "99" indicates the type of problem. This condition usually indicates a media failure or a geometry mismatch (e.g., bad disk parameters).
Unfortunately, "99"does not seem to match a known error code; I'm guessing it's related to "11":

Quote:

0x11 ECC correction successful. A read error occurred, but was corrected. LILO does not recognize this condition and aborts the load process anyway. A second load attempt should succeed.

Check out this link for more info.

deesto · 12-16-2002, 05:23 PM

BTW, from searching the forum & web, this could be a pure hardware problem. It might help to take a look at your hardware, especially motherboard, CPU, hard drive, and do some searching to see if any forum users have reported problems using one or more of them in Linux?