Dear members,

My PC stops at "L" of LILO and freezes. No error code provided and only L with blinking cursor indicated.

I have checked the hard disk by booting PD from Acronis backup 11 CD. The hard disk is shown there and could be monitored for different directories, so it does not seems to be a hard disk failure.

Thank you for your help in Advance.

More information please. Was lilo booting fine before and suddenly stopped or is this a new installation which never could boot up? What distro are you running? Have you made any hardware changes prior to this problem occurring? When lilo stops at "L" it means that the first stage of lilo has loaded and it is having problems loading the second stage.

Please find bellow the answers to your questions:

1- It is not new installation and system was working well before and suddenly stops booting
2- Linux version is a customized Redhat version 2.4.9-34
3- I have not change hardware but recently (sometimes) the computer stops at BIOS boot by three successive beeps and start again after reset. This problem also occurred after I have connected some optical drive to SCSI card. However after that PC booted several times.

As I remember the last time I have start this computer, it was from Acronis 14 live CD which does not respond. (Acronis 11 still boots and see the Hard disk.)

Thank you

The obvious thing to try would be to remove the added scsci optical drive and see if the problem goes away. The lilo "L" error usually means either a faulty hard drive or a mis-configured lilo.conf. The latter can occur if you add a new hard drive or optical drive which causes a shift in the device file assignment for your old hard drive. Your lilo.conf may designate /dev/sda1 as your root partition but your hard drive can become /dev/sdb when you add a new device to the scsi bus.

The bios beep codes are also troubling. Determine what type of BIOS you have on your system and look up what the beep codes mean here:

http://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm

They are different for every BIOS maker. Three short beeps generally indicates a ram problem but you should verify this after determining the BIOS maker for your motherboard.

Finally, Acronis is not the best tool to use for examining your hard drive health. Try using the GParted livecd instead:

http://gparted.org/

You want to check to make sure the partition structure on your hard drive is properly recognized and the partitions are healthy.

Thank you for your advise.

I already have removed the SCSI optical drive (External) in first attempt after getting alarm beeps. Alarm beeps removes and BIOS starts but LILO stops at L. Your suggestions made me think about the SCSI card (placed in the PCI extension slot) may became faulty. The HDD is also SCSI type and connected to that card.

I think I should remove the SCSI card and test PC start up?

It's worth a try. I would also try to boot up with the gparted livecd with the scsi hard drive attached. By using gparted you can tell if your scsi hard drive is being properly detected and get some idea whether it is functioning properly.