System Down: Broken LILO after failed kernel upgrade. Please help!
 

All,

After a failed kernel upgrade from 2.4.29 to 2.6.10, my system has stopped booting, and displays error 9A over half my screen rather than the LILO boot menu where I previously could chose between Linux and XP (need XP for work, office policy).

However, now nothing boots, and I'm getting worried about not having a functional PC for the office tomorrow. Any assistance on how to restore LILO so that it lets me at least boot XP would be greatly appreciated

My lilo.conf has these fields:

boot = /dev/hda2
message= /boot/boot_message.txt
prompt
timeout = 1200
change-rules
reset
vga=normal

other = /dev/hda1
label = Windows
table = /dev/hda

image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda2
label= Linux
read-only

image = /boot/vmlinuz.old
root = /dev/hda2
label= Linux.old
read-only
#end

I suspect the error to be the System.map though, as there were multiple symlinks pointing to themselves after my failed kernel upgrade. Also, the 9A error seems to mean lilo won't even complete boot phase 2.

If you read this and have some insight or webpages with how to fix it to point me to, I would greatly appreciate your input.

-Y1

if you can boot using a live CD, you can try removing lilo. The command is
lilo -u
which uses a backup of the MBR stored in the /boot directory. If the backup is still that of the original windows MBR, you should be able to boot windows again.

You could also use a dos boot disk and then do
fdisk /mbr

There's also a way to do it with an XP installation CD but I'm not sure how that goes. Just search this forum for restoring MBR (or google) and you should find tons of stuff.