I recently had to resort to using the LILO boot loader because GRUB failed to install on an Adaptec SCSI RAID card. Support from Adaptec was sparse and cryptic, so it was just easier to install a boot loader that worked.

Now I get an error on boot where LILO will repeat 99 many times and then halt. I am curious if people here know what is required to get GRUB to install on an Adaptec ASR2405 RAID card?? Any suggestions appreciated, of course.

Is that a true hardware SCSI card?

Did you check the lilo docs to see what '99' means?

Hi there, yes indeed it is a true hardware scsi card, the ASR2405, and I googled LILO 99 for a while with little success. I am more interested in figuring out why Grub will not install.

What specific problem are you having with Grub? Did you try something like:
grub-install /dev/hdf (install GRUB to the MBR of 'hdf')?

If the 'grub-install' didn't complain, does GRUB print out anything at all when you attempt to boot?

Hi there, yes in fact it was the grub-install that complained. The error I got was 'execution of grub-install /dev/sda failed.'

OK, the install may have failed because there isn't even a '/dev/sda' - find out what device represents your RAID and install to that, but before you run the installer again, check the configuration files /boot/grub/device.map and /boot/grub/menu.lst

Another possibility is that the RAID doesn't allow you to alter the MBR (but that would be very strange behavior) - in such a case, you should still be able to install GRUB to a specific partition (usually the partition used by the Linux filesystem root)

How did you install - did you change devices on the IDE channels or anything like that?

Can you use the GRUB bootloader on the install CD to enter information and boot from the RAID?
You can use the 'find' tool of GRUB like this:
find /boot/grub/menu.lst
or even specify a specific HD:
find (hd0) /boot/grub/menu.lst
or even the partition:
find (hd0,0) /boot/grub/menu.lst


You will need to specify the 'root' (for the root filesystem of Linux), kernel, and initrd image to use. If you can do that via the CD's GRUB, you have a chance of at least booting Linux with the initrd image - after that the boot process may stop due to incorrect entries in 'fstab', but we can fix that later.