Im having problems booting a system. I'm getting a L 99 99 99 ... 99 repeated error. It doesnt give a boot prompt.

I managed to get the system to boot off the raid array (sda). But i had to disable the two ide hard drives, remove the boot flag from hda1 and change the boot order in the bios.

I've tried finding good docs on the subject but have failed to find detailed ones that include this sort of thing.

What I want is:
1. To have the MBR on /dev/sda (the hardware raid array)
2. lilo will give the options to boot from sda1 or hda1 (the compaq diagnostics partition)

What is the proper way to do this? and how do I go about it?

fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 73.3 GB, 73328371200 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 8915 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 243 1951866 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 244 729 3903795 83 Linux
...

fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14589 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 5 40131 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/hda2 6 4868 39062047+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 4869 14589 78083932+ 83 Linux



/etc/lilo.conf:

boot = /dev/sda
lba32
delay = 50
vga = 773

image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/sda1
label = 2.4.21-1
read-only

other = /dev/hda1
label = diag

Just an idea - Try installing LILO to the MBR on /dev/hda and also get rid of any flags on a partition.

You want a situation where your BIOS just looks for a bootloader in 1 place, not 2.

so - change the

boot= .directive in lilo.conf to

boot=/dev/hda

and make sure you get rid of any flags.

After youve changed lilo.conf make sure you run

/sbin/lilo

as root user to make the changes take effect

Ive tried using hda1 as mbr, but i still get that l 99 .. error

/dev/hda1 isnt your MBR - thats the first partition of the primary master drive - - The boot directive for your MBR is /dev/hda

The MBR on your 1st hard drive is a tiny boot sector that comes before and is separate from your first partition on that drive.

yea, that was a typo on my part...

When i tried the MBR of hda (boot=/dev/hda) i still got the L 99 99 99 99

So theres something wrong... its not finding the kernel image on sda1