Hi,

I'm getting an error whenever I try to boot without a boot disk. All I get is "L 99 99 99 99... "(99s filling up about 5 lines). From what I've gathered this is coming from a disk error saying LILO's not reading something preperly. The problem here is I don't know how to fix it.

I'm running Slackware 9.1 with one of the 2.4 kernals...whatever the latest downloadable ISO was in March. It's on an ASUS motherboard with an Athlon XP 2600+ and a relatively newly purchased Western Digital 80GB hard drive. It has 3 partitions, one for Linux, one for Swap, and one FAT32 (hda1 5 and 6 respectively). LILO has been placed by the Slackware CDs in the root directory and the master boot record with the same results. Just about all the hardware here was purchased at most 3 months ago. I've tried re-formating (not quickly) a couple of times and this isn't going away. Help?

i was just reading some info about this...

is your computer only linux partitions or does it have windows?

this could very well just be a problem with the way BIOS is handling the disk.... get into your bios (usually by hitting ESC or F1 while powering on computer) and check the options for the hard drive; specifically check for an option you can change to "LBA" vs. "NORMAL".... make sure all the other options seem correct or post them here so we can see what they say

this will work (hopefully) as long as lilo is in the mbr

if you want to install into the first boot sector of root, you will want to set your root partition active in cfdisk (but it will turn off the ability to boot windows if you have windows installed)

Checked the bios for the primary IDE device. They options were set as follows, with an * representing a setting that I could not alter:

Type [AUTO] (I could change this to User HDD....)

cylinders - 1024*
head - 255*
sector - 63*
CHS Capacity - 8422 MB*
Max LBA Capacity - 80026 MB*

Multi Sector Transfers - Maximum (Options: Disable, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, Max)
Smart Monitoring - Enabled (Was disabled when problem started)
Pio - 4*
Ultra DMZ - 5*

hmm, nothing looks wrong from what i can see.... lilo may just not like the way the geometry of the disk is, but that is beyond me...

you could try playing with pio modes or udma modes, but be WARNED: hard drive corruption can easily happen, so only do this after thoroughly considering.... you can change them only if you set the auto option to user hdd

you may just want to see if you can get grub to work; the linux from scratch book explains how to set it up