I wrote this message in the General forum, since the problem, as you will see, could have many sources:

Recently, I installed Slackware 10.2 on my old computer that did not have an Internet connection and so also no antivirus. It went just fine for a while, until some idiot (that is me) came with the bright idea of changing some hard disks (including the one with Linux on it: I've got two with Windows as well) and inserting a network card.
Happily, and unknowing of the chaos that was about to come, I pressed the ON button.

All went fine during the boot, until it was about to "verify the DMI Pool Data", upon which my evil box of metal and plastic told me to go
myself. Then it froze.

"Hmmm", I thought. "Linux+unplug=no good. Linux+inplug=happy, happy."

I swapped hard disks again (that was the way I did it before I got hold of another computer with free IDE sockets: Swapping between Linux and the third Windows disk). My theory worked! The string of 99's only came to "L 99 99", when LILO started (the program of doom presumably still running in the background). I supposed that since the "L 99999" had started running in the background now, it had always done so, without me noticing it (doublethink). I happily hit ENTER, starting Windows in order to install my network card.

It did not work (as most things in Windows), so I went to download some driver files for it. Lady Luck was sadistic once again: The card had an improper labelling, i.e. a picture of a lobster and a serial number. Searching for "lobsterish logo" would of course not work, so I tried with the serial number. Not entirely unexpected, I got only a Chinese page. The URLs were luckily written in the Latin alphabet, so at last I found out what the lobster meant: Realtek. I downloaded some drivers, and moved them over to the problematic little brat of a computer, and tried to install them. was the response.
"We'll see about that", I said cryptically, tried again a couple of times, but had to give up to the forces of nature.

I let the computer rest for a day or two, partly because of its bad attitude towards me, but mostly because it had created a huge bleeding wound in my finger when I became mad at the network card (don't ask).

Today I started it once again. Instead of verifying the DMI Pool (or perhaps it did both, I don't remember), it said that it was "updating the EMOS-something register".
"Yes!" I thought. "At last it is fixing itself by updating and resetting whatever I might have done wrong!"

The satanistic, child-eating computer didn't make it to the "L 99 99"-part (nor did it come to LILO), until it found a boot time virus:

It recommended that I should boot with a floppy, and I did. Oh, yes, I did. But then my knowledge of computers leaped out of my window, landed on my petunias and took buss number 163 to Sätra:
How do I run a CD-ROM, install the antivirus on it and scan my computer from a 2 MB version of the OS?

I do not want to reformat the hard disks, since that would be far too simple and a waste of Linux Questions resources by writing this text. Furthermore, they contain valuable files that I want to save.

In short, my problems are:

• Finding a console based antivirus (most urgent!)
• Resetting the master boot record and uninstalling LILO (the possible source of L 99)
• Configuring my network card (you don't have to help me with that, though.)
• Learning Chinese
• Healing my finger wound
• Eating Bill Gates and Windows
• World domination: Should I take Norway first or head straight for Russia?

Has anyone had the same problem as me?


I am terribly sorry if the above text is somewhat incoherent, and involves unnecessary details. My excuse is that I have not got much sleep during the last week. I'll add that to the list:

• Falling asleep

I'll edit this message when my brain is working again.

Yes, it was a bit incoherent, but it happens.
From what I understand, Knoppix or another liveCD would be a good start. At the very least you could use it to get your files off before reformatting the hard drive. For fixing the mbr, I believe the command was "fdisk /mbr", which clears it. You will definately want to check that one first though to make sure it does what you expect. Also, Knoppix probably has clamav, which is an anti-virus package which likely has a console mode.
After that you can use the Slackware install CDs to boot into your existing Slackware install, and setup lilo again from there. You might even want to try doing that first, who knows maybe it'll work.
In case you don't know how to do that, you basically put in the Slackware CD and boot from it, and instead of just pressing enter at the prompt, you would follow the instructions on the screen and do something like "root=/dev/hda1 ro". Again, read the instructions and check around more.
Give those two a go, I imagine worst case scenario you can recover your data (even if it means putting the hard drive as a slave in another computer and copying that way).
Good luck.

This exact thing happened to me, and it was caused by the kernel moving to a different location on the disk when I shuffled some partitions around (the disk location that lilo saved as pointing to my kernel now pointed to garbage data).

Rerunning lilo solved my problem. I'd bet it would solve yours as well... the "L 99" one, anyway. Just boot the first slackware disc, follow the instructions to boot your root partition, login as root, and run lilo.

If you do have a boot virus (which I highly doubt), running lilo ought to overwrite it.

Try f-prot. I'm not sure if there are any free-as-in-speech virus scanners out there, but f-prot is free-as-in-beer for Linux users once you give them an e-mail address.

The L 99 999 999 error usually means that you changed the drive boot order, or updating lilo.conf was aborted, or the wrong partition is marked active.

You could try turning off the bios antivirus function. It sees a non microsoft mbr on the disk and assumes that lilo is a virus. So you are seeing a false positive message. Of course, you could boot up with knoppix and scan the drive offline to make sure.