[NBLUG/talk] Boot Failure

[E Frank Ball]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 12:18:15PM -0800, Peter Lutz AA6AV wrote:
 > Good Afternoon.
 > 
 > I managed to screw up the booting of a Debian Unstable system
 > yesterday.  The guys working on our new roof hit the power line
 > for about a 1 second outage.  The box boots fine off the rescue
 > floppy and runs just fine.  It dual boots Debian and Win 2K. 
 > (well, it did), but I have not used the Win 2K since installing
 > VMware and running windows on that.  
 > 
 > What happens now is that the screen half fills with
 > L 99 99 99 99 99...
 > and it freezes.  It will not boot off a CD, but it will boot off
 > the rescue floppy which contains lilo.conf, vmlinuz, map, lost&
 > found. I checked the BIOS settings, and as near as I can tell,
 > they are OK.  As a last resore I told the BIOS to set the
 > defaults, but nothing changed. 
 > 
 > So, does it look like I screwed up the MBR, part of lilo, or
 > what?

Try re-running lilo for a start.

from man lilo:

99  invalid second stage index sector (LILO)

When the first stage loader gets control, it types the
letter "L"; when it is ready to transfer control to the second stage
loader it types the letter "I".  If any error occurs, like a disk read
error, it will put out a hex- adecimil error code, and then it will
re-try the operation.  All hex error codes are BIOS return values,  
except for the lilo-generated 40, 99 and 9A.

...

Errors 99 and 9A usu- ally mean the map file (-m or map=) is not
readable, likely because LILO was not re-run after some system change,
or there is a geometry mis-match between what LILO used (lilo -v3 to
display) and what is actually being used by the BIOS (one of the lilo
diagnostic disks, available in the source distribution, may be needed to
diagnose this problem).

       When the second stage loader has received control from the first
stage, it prints the let- ter "L", and when it has initialized itself,
including verifying the "Descriptor Table" - the list of kernels/others
to boot - it will print the letter "O", to form the full word "LILO", in
uppercase.

       All second stage loader error messages are English text, and try
to pinpoint, more or less successfully, the point of failure.

-- 

   E Frank Ball                frankb at frankb.us