I am running Mandrake 9.1 and am seeing a problem with LILO that seems to coincide with power failures. I am dual booting Windows XP and Mandrake 9.1. Windows XP is on my primary hard rive and Mandrake is installed on a seperate hard drive (slave on same chain). I have LILO installed on the MBR of the primary hard drive.

Everything works well until there is a power failure. After a power failure, during the next boot the system POSTs and then fills the screen with 99's. The only way I have found to fix this problem is to boot with the rescue disk, restore my Windows MBR, and then do an upgrade install of Mandrake. For some reason the rescue disk cannot find my LINUX drive when I try to reinstall LILO with the rescue disk.

I have the S.M.A.R.T. hard drive option enabled in my BIOS. Could this be the problem? This is very annoying and I would like to find the source of the problem and fix it.

Thanks,
Bengal571

Welcome to LQ

Do you have a lot of power failures? You might look into a UPS, they can be setup to correctly shutdown the system once power has been knocked out, saving you from the problems that come with improper shutdowns.

Anyway, have you tried dropping in your Mandrake CD, at the first screen pressing "F1" for more options, then typing:
rescue
And attempting a LILO rescue from there? That is usually the best way I've found.

Cool

I am going to try using the Windows XP boot loader (NTLDR) since I do not have any problems using that. It's a little more trouble but it doable (according to the miniHOWTO). I am also writing the author of LILO to get his input as well.

Bengal571