Lilo errror L99 99 99 99 ad nauseum.

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Lilo errror L99 99 99 99 ad nauseum.
started by: daklander

Posted by daklander on Dec. 06 2005,04:37

OK, I've been mucking around with a bunch of the small distros and keep coming back to DSL for a couple of old computers, one a pentium 200 and the box with the coming problem, a Cyrix 260, I think. It runs at 200MHz. I tried to do a hard drive install using Lilo because there was an error trying Grub. I don't remember if this was with an earlier version of DSL or Puppy. Sorry. Anyway, I booted to a windows 98 diskette and partitioned and formatted the drive. An old 850mb drive. I tried to cfdisk from the live DSL. It tossed me an error so I live booted Feather and used its cfdisk to re-partition the drive to a linux and linux swap partition, then ran an install of DSL and chose Grub as the boot loader. That all looked like it went well and I got to the reboot, cd drawer opened and I pulled the cd, closed the drawer and hit enter. The reboot started and I got the L99 99 99 99 adnauseum error. How in the hell do I get rid of that Lilo junk left over? I couldn't find anything on a search here.

Posted by AwPhuch on Dec. 06 2005,07:43

HD must be Primary on IDE0

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by skaos on Dec. 06 2005,13:02

If you don't mind wiping the entire disk, you can boot the live CD and use this command (assuming /dev/hda is your disk):
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
Alternatively, you could wipe only the master boot record:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

Posted by daklander on Dec. 06 2005,16:22

Quote (AwPhuch @ Dec. 06 2005,02:43)

HD must be Primary on IDE0

Brian
AwPhuch

Yes, the drive is primary. It's the only drive in the unit and is on ide0.

Posted by daklander on Dec. 06 2005,16:25

Quote (skaos @ Dec. 06 2005,08:02)

I have no problems with wiping the entire disk and yes, the HD is hda1. I think I'll try wiping only the mbr first though. Thanks for the instruction.

I thought that doing an unconditional format from the win98 boot disk would have cleaned the whole drive but apparently it leaves the mbr alone.

Posted by larkl on Dec. 07 2005,00:13

I use AEFDISK to wipe out partitions, especially when going back and forth from Win to linux. Here's the site:

< AEFDISK >

Of course, there are others. This is handy as it can also reinstall the DOS MBR if needed.

Posted by sarah on Dec. 07 2005,13:54

And in case others come across the thread, the problem is referenced in the Wiki at:
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Installing_Grub >

Quote

Please NOTE - As of DSL 1.3 a basic GRUB installation is automated in the frugal install script located in the Apps > Tools menu.
So, you got yet another perfect install of L99 99 99 99 .., eh?

Well I can hook you up.

Of course I have no idea how current that is, but I hope it helps someone. ;o)
Cheers and beers!
Sarah

Posted by daklander on Dec. 08 2005,00:12

Skaos Thanks.

That did the trick. I went ahead and wrote the whole drive instead of trying the mbr first. Thinking back on it, and from what I read, the L 99 99 99 that I associated with a bad Lilo install was from a bad Frugal Grub install I had tried.

After that writing of the drive the install went fine and the grub install went fine so I swapped that 812mb drive into an old pentium 166MHz unit with 96MB RAM that won't allow a cd boot. That unit fired up just fine.
I presume that what I did there was write zeros to the drive like a low level format in dos???

Now I'm in process of installing DSL on a 2Gig drive I'm going to stick into that old Cyrix 266 I pulled the other drive out of. Gotta do the format and then repartition & etc but it should be fine for a old POS and run pretty well since it ran Windows ME ok.

Thanks again for the help.

Posted by Ceres on Jan. 24 2006,17:21

Thank you Daklander and Skaos.

My problem wasn't precisely the same, but close enough that the info you provided was sufficient to solve it.

I have a DSM (the nano-ITX) with a 512Mb internal Compact Flash which acts like a CD version (frugal). I had already successfully upgraded (with a fresh install) from 2.0 to 2.1. When I saw that 2.1b was out I decided to do the same and see if I could add a default setting for myDSL. The fresh installs were pretty painless because I hadn't done any more than some Firefox configuration.

I followed the procedure of installing to a USB, booting to the USB and doing an frugal install of dsl-2.1b.iso to hda1 using a LILO option. Before the install finished something flashed in the temporary terminal window which disappeared too quickly and the system rebooted. My auto retore was pointing at hda1 also and while it was doing the pre-shutdown copy it began pumping out errors, some of which told me that KNOPPIX had been hit.

Not a good feeling as I let it start booting up on hda1 - sure enough it failed. That was Sunday night ("now" is Tuesday noon-ish) and I don't remember if the error was "not a boot disk" but I think it was.

Since then I have spent all of my free time (and some of my expensive time) trying to recover. I did several versions of sfdisk and at some point I ws able to bring it up on a regular hard-disk install, but I didn't want to stay there because that would eat up the CF write limit. When I tried to do a frugal install over that, a boot just got me the "L 99 99 99 ..... 99" response.

I found your conversation by searching the forums for "boot AND lilo AND 99". Skaos' advice and Daklander's positive response led me to believe that I would be able to do the same thing.

I formated the partition as "0 993 L *", wrote the MBR block, did a standard install then did a frugal Grub install.

Joy!

Thank you both.

Dave