URGENT! Boot disk failure code 99...

Aunty Em

Aunty Em

Well-Known Member
... that's all i get when I start my kt7a after posting when it attempts to start windows. Several lines of 99...

Then the legend "boot disk failure. Insert system disk etc...."

... when booting from A: drive I cannot recognise c: or d:...

has my hard-drive died?
 
Ok.. I've booted from a: with my rescue disk and started with cd-rom support so I'm now recognising the cd rom....

and I can now read the windows partition on c:
 
Me on that one and linux on the 2nd partition... it looks as though linux has fucked up... something has gone wrong with the partition it's reading it as a logical dos partition, but that's not how I formatted it. I've been having a look with fdisk.
 
I'm not at home, and I don't want to tell you how to rebuild the bootloader without looking there first (might get it wrong). What you could do is fdisk/mbr. This will make it so only windows will boot, but you'll still be able to get into Linux with your boot disk.
Damn, I know just how to do this in Win2K, but I don't remember which files you have to edit in 9x/ME. It'll be at least an hour before I get home, and I know it's pretty late there...

You could also check on one of the Linux help sites if you'd rather not wait.
 
I rebooted and it's now booting into windows, but i also went to the just linux forum and looked up boot loader problems...

I think this may be the problem:
my research so far has led me to believe that in order for you to boot (to anything) the boot record has to reside on the first 1024 bytes of your HDA drive. At bootup the system cannot see beyond that first bit of harddisk and goes searching there for the boot record. If you have Lilo mounted on Hdb, then it will never be found when the machine starts up.
Click to expand...


I have linux on the second partition. If I were to reformat the d: drive and transfer windows there then re-install linux on the c: (first partition) will that work. There is nothing in linux that I need to keep.
 
That limitation was only in earlier versions of LILO ,since Mandrake 7.2 that hasn't been a problem.I had Mandrake 7.2-8 installed on the last 20GB of my 60 GB had without bootloader difficulties.What Bootloader you using?
 
A.B. is right, that's an old problem that doesn't apply anymore. Aren't you using Mandrake 9.1? I use the Windows bootloader, but it's only available in NT versions.

P.S. I don't think Win ME will boot from anything but the primary partition on the primary drive. I might have that wrong.
 
A.B.Normal said:
That limitation was only in earlier versions of LILO ,since Mandrake 7.2 that hasn't been a problem.I had Mandrake 7.2-8 installed on the last 20GB of my 60 GB had without bootloader difficulties.What Bootloader you using?
Click to expand...
I think it's lilo... it's blue if that helps? And yes, it is Mandrake 9.1.

I can boot with the linux boot disc, but it can't read my cd-rom... I'm assuming this is because it's not d: drive but e:... ?( tell me if i'm wrong.

I'm a total beginner with linux... I can untar files and install rpms but beyond that i haven't yet gone.... so i have no idea what to do at the moment. :eek:

I think I will go to bed as it's nearly midnight here and apply my mind to it when I'm not feeling tired and frustrated. I won't have time to deal with this before sunday as I'm going to be pretty busy tomorrow. At least it's booting into windows now which is something.

Thanks for trying to help though. If you can think of anything that may help I'd still be grateful... :)
 
that 1024cyc boundary sure still aplies to my kt7a-r mobo, i couldn't get near a win2000 install if i placed the partition start outside 8gb.
 
i suppose you could see if you can get to the boot.ini file in win me and edit out the lilo loader in there, i'm not really that brilliant on multi-boot problems i'm afraid. :(
 
Can't find a boot.ini file in Me...

Sorry, but I've had it... I'm going to bed... it'll just have to wait.
 
That's cause there isn't one. ME uses IO.SYS to start the boot process. I'm sure ris knows that too but you get used to thinking in 2K. I think it has to be a LILO problem, have you installed any new programs lately? LILO has been working up until this problem occurred, so it's unlikely to be the 1024cyc limit. When I ran into that in the past, It never would boot correctly until I fixed it.
 
No new programs. I re-installed linux the other day because it wouldn't recognise my new soundcard, but that's all.

Initially it worked oK... then yesterday day, before all this, linux failed to load and told me it couldn't find the init file? Or something like that... so I decided to re-install again, as I had nothing to lose, but half way through the install for some unknown reason it failed and that's when I got L + 99s on startup and as I said now I can't get it to recognise my cd-rom to try the re-install again. I wasn't watching the install so I don't know exactly what happened to stop it installing. :shrug:

I've been looking at in in isolation from the previous events... that's what happens when you're very tired and can't think strainht.

I think basically what has happened is that it's formatted before the install and the bootloader is nolonger there or half the operating system for that matter. I think the best thing for me to do is rescue what I want from Me, then use Blaster, which is the utility I used originally to partition the disk, and reformat and partition it from scratch. Unless anyone knows how I can get it to recognise the cd-rom in rescue (which I found for the first time last night). I don't know what to type. :shrug:
 
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