System hangs on boot up - Prints one L and many 9s.
 

Hello!

I have an old (2003?) Sony Vaio desktop running slackware 13.37. It was a standard install using default install options. I recently powered the machine down so I could loan the monitor to a friend. It will not reboot. It powers up, I see the intial device listing, then it prints an L and a metric ton of the number 9, stops printing 9s, and hangs. Never makes it to the initial Slackware screen that asks you to choose an OS and is dead in the water.

As a test of the system I put Disk One from the Slackware installation disks in the disk drive and booted up...that worked perfectly fine. Please help

Thanks,

Mark

This sounds like Slack is using lilo (which I have not used in >10 years!) as bootloader.
If you can boot from another medium, do so and firstly rescue your important files to an external drive.
Then fix up lilo
Search for lilo L99 for some HOWTOs
Eg. (not tested, please man lilo first)

I'm a beginner in Linux. I will have to make a Linux boot disk off of a Windows laptop. Is that possible? Can you share a good link?

No need to create any kind of system boot disk...

...you already have one...

Simply boot into the install disk and mount the hard drive from there. For example...

If successful then it should be an easy matter to figure out why Lilo is not happy.

Hints: Have you installed or removed any drives or pluggable devices that would normally not be or would normally be present?

Get it booted and mounted then we can go from there.

Note: I woul NOT run lilo -M at this time - that WILL change the mbr and at this point we do NOT know what the problem actually is!

The only thing I can think of is that I removed the Bluetooth dongle for my wireless keyboard and mouse so I could use the wireless mouse on my laptop for a minute. However, I removed it after the system was powered down and replaced it before I powered the system back up again.

That shouldn't matter, especially if it was plugged back before boot.

Boot into the install media and post the output of:

I have some more information. 'L 99 99 99 99 (repeat)' means 'Invalid Second Stage: Mismatch between drive and BIOS geometry, or a bad map file. Some evidence that LINEAR needs to be set on the disk (see LiloNotes)' I don't understand what that means though.

Here is the output of fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19547 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x202711cd

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 19535039 9767488+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/sda2 * 19535040 312581807 146523384 83 Linux

OK, good - it recognizes the disk and partitions.

I wonder if your CMOS battery is bad and BIOS has the wrong disk info? Can you boot into the setup utility and check the clock (will be way srong if cmos is dead.

After that, we will boot into the installer, mount the root partition and chroot into it - you will then be running your installed Slackware if successful. We can then look at your lilo.conf and just try to reinstall lilo.

You might also want to boot into the install disk, chroot and run smartctl -a /dev/sda to for quick look at drive health.

I have to step out for an hour or so... be right back.

Will do my best to try all of those things before you get back. I can't find lilo or lilo.conf anywhere when I booted from the install disk. Could it have gotten corrupted somehow?

Absolutely nothing wrong with CMOS except set for wrong time zone. :)
I used the install disk to boot up.
Then:
>mkdir /mydrive
>mount /dev/sda2 /mydrive

Ready whenever you are.

Great... OK let's try this, booted to install media, /dev/sda2 mounted to /mydrive

Stay chrooted and I'll try to keep an eye on this thread, but will be in and out next little while... patience please.

*** UPDATE ***

Looking ahead...

What all of the above should tell us is that the system runs chrooted, the drive is healthy (smartctl -a) and that your /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf correspond to your actual partitions.

If there are problems or error messages we will address them as they appear.

Otherwise, assuming lilo -t does not report errors, you should just run lilo (chrooted, with no options). If that works, see if it will boot normally - it should.

If not, then we need to look more deeply for disk corruption...

cat /etc/fstab

>/dev/sda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
>/dev/sda2 / ext2 defaults 1 1
>#/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,owner,ro 0 0
>/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
>devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
>proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
>tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0


smartctl -s on /dev/sda

>===START OF ENABLE/DISABE COMMANDS SECTION===
>SMART Enabled

smartctl -a /dev/sda

>I don't have an easy way to post all of that information right now...it said no errors in multiple places

cat /etc/lilo.conf

>boot = /dev/root

stanzas...

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

lilo -t

>Fatal: raid_setup: stat("/dev/root")

Generally the boot = and root = lines will point to the partition so I would expect: /dev/sda2 in your case. I see there is a message referencing raid setup. I don't use RAID so I don't know if that has anything to do with the problem.

Ah! I had not considered that a raid configuration may be involved...

While booted to the install media there is not going to be a /dev/root device.

Do you have redundant drives in that machine? Is this maybe a fake raid (forget what they call that)?

I guess I should also ask if you are using any kind of disk encryption too...? Have you possibly pulled a drive and and moved a cable to a different slot?

I would guess that your drive(s) is/are OK and all your data is good. We can probably boot it by passing suitable boot params to lilo at boot time, or by editing fstab and lilo.conf to use the actual locations on that drive... but...

I am not a raid guru and am going to ask someone with basic raid skills to step up here and advise the safe and easy way forward to reinstall lilo on a raid setup. In the mean time I will do some catch-up reading and see if my memory jogs to the quick answer.

But to summarize - it is a misconfiguration/error/ordering problem in your raid setup that is causing lilo to not find the second stage loader - which is probably present. So don't change anything for the moment...

I don't use raid either. It's just a regular IDE spinning hard drive. Nothing special.

It's not a RAID. its just a 'regular' off the shelf spinning hard drive. I've not flipped any switched or anything. It's the only HD and should be the master.

It is not a raid AFAIK. It's just a standard spinning IDE harddrive.

Ok, let's try this...

First, while chrooted as above, is there an /etc/raidtab file? If so, post it's contents here...

Then the big question - how did this drive get configured for raid - clearly it is! Was it possibly pulled from a different machine? Can you supply a little history?

Ignoring all of that, to install lilo and boot, lets do this (still while chrooted):

This completely skirts the question of why it was raid, and what other possible complications there may be as a result of that, but this should make it boot non-raid.

This is the harddrive installed in the machine:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3160215A 160GB 7200 RPM 2MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 / ATA-6 3.5" Hard Drive (Perpendicular Recording) Bare Drive

It's not very happy with me right now because of all of the hard restarts and powerdowns, but it booted from the hard drive.

---------- Post added 09-18-15 at 07:47 PM ----------

...because I forgot to unmount /dev/sda2 prior to restarts...

OK it finished checking itself and rebooted.Awesome. I have my system again. Thank you so much!

Great!

I am still curious how it ever got configured and was, presumably, booting as raid...?

But if it doesn't matter to you then it doesn't matter to me! ;)

Be alert for any unexpected behaviors, but as the fstab was already set for the existing partitions you shouldn't see anything, at least once booted!

Glad to help!

I really have no idea. I am curious too but simply don't have enough experience to figure out how something like that would happen. I had no boot issues for years and then all of a sudden it thinks it's a RAID system...weird. Anyhow, I noticed that a lot of people have switched to GRUB(2) and I think I even saw you participating in an animated discussion about it. Should I consider GRUB(2)?

Did you do the original install, or someone else? Or I wonder if there is another lilo.conf in a different place or with a different name. But doesn't really matter now!

A few things to make yourself a note of, for future reference (while fresh in mind):

1. You can always boot into the install disc to troubleshoot your Slackware install - no real need for another boot disc.
2. Once booted to the installer, you can mount and chroot into your actual system to do things like configs - and reinstall lilo, or to recover data from a failing drive.
3. It would be easy to start by just reinstalling lilo, but a systematic check of drives and boot configs is always best - now you know why it didn't work and also know your drive is OK. Best confidence route!

As for grub - I am not a grub fan or user. As long as you are on a Slackware install with a machine that supports it, Lilo is MUCH easier to manage and troubleshoot, in my opinion! Just stick with what works! ;)

I have a few additional comments I may try to add later but out of time for now!

Glad it works and good luck!

Noted. Thank you for all of your help!