HELP!! Getting L 04 04 04 04 04... on restart after installation
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HELP!! After installation neither Linux nor Windows ran!
When I tried installing Linux Mandrake 8.0 everything was going great, I had no problems. I got to the end of the installation, and the computer restarted.
Well at the point where it used to say, "Starting Windows" or what ever, all I got was:
L 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 04 etc.
The 04 part just kept on repeating! I restarted my computer with my windows startup disk only to find windows no longer started, not even if I ran the autoexec file etc.
I reinstalled windows and no it's working fine, but Linux is out of reach. I installed linux on a partition on my d: drive. The only possible change I could think of in the installation procedure was one of the last questions it asked, something about either writing on the boot sector of drive c or beginining of the partition (which was only for people who knew EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE DOING) So How do I fix the problem?
Please help, I really want Linux to run, especially after all the trouble it has caused me!
Am I right in thinking this could be a LILO problem??
Anyway there should be an option of booting from a boot disk which is made rather than messing with your master boot record on the main drive.
LILO has problems on some PC,S because the motherboard bios requires the MBR to be on the first 1024k of disk space. On newer PC,S this isnt much of a problem.
There should also be an LBA option when you configure LILO.
Although i,ve never seen the error message L 04,04,04 before, if LILO has a problem it usually just prints L,LI,LIL if something is wrong and ofcourse LILO when everything is ok.
This is most definately a LILO problem. You installed straight to the Root partition or MBR. Whichever you did, try the other. If neither work your either going to have to go with Grub, or perhaps some other bootloader, or just a plain old floppy.
I see what you are getting at with these replies, thank you. I should have mentioned this before...I know absoloutely nothing about Linux...I'm trying to start. If you someone could give a brief explaination about what all this means?
It appears that you installed lilo into the MBR. When you reinstalled windows, windows overwrote the MBR. Now, you don't get the L 04 04 04 04 04 message.
When you installed linux, it should of asked you if you wanted to make a boot disk. If you made one, try using it to boot into linux.
Unfortunately I cant figure out how to get around this problem, if it didnt reboot automatically then I have the instructions on what to do from the desktop, but if you never get that far they arent gonna be of much use to you.
But I know it is possible to specify boot parameters somewhere in the startup process, hopefully someone with a bit more knowledge than myself may see this post.
Alternatively you may want to try the expert install, its one of the first questions it asks you (Easy Install or Expert Install), then maybe you may get more boot options than you did previously. If so then I recommend you choose grub. But where it says boot device put in fdo and have a floppy ready, that way it doesnt write to your MBR.
After installing linux one more time, and trying to use GRUB rather that LILO I found myself unable to reinstall Windows...leaving me out in the cold. Luckily I was able to reformat my d: drive and then physically change the drives around to install Windows without loosing all my data, but sacrificing the functionality of all my programs.
During the process I think I may have stumbled upon a possible cause for all this trouble...the modes that my Hard drives were set to in the BIOS. I found a little note about how some OS's require the Hard Drive to be in NORMAL mode, and this included UNIX if I am not mistaken, and I figure Linux may be similar. Anyways, both my hard drives are not set to NORMAL, one is LBA the other is set to LARGE. That is the only explaination I could come up with.
I think I'll stay away from Linux until I get my new computer for University in September, so thanks alot for the help and maybe I'll be back in a few weeks.
Originally posted by RecoilUK LILO has problems on some PC,S because the motherboard bios requires the MBR to be on the first 1024k of disk space. On newer PC,S this isnt much of a problem.
There are some mistakes here.
MBR is always the first 512 byte of your hard disk.
Your kernel (located in /boot directory) needs to be within the first 1024 cylinders which is your first 8 gig.
This limitation has to do with the way your BIOS addresses your hard disk, cylinders, heads and sectors.
Linux Mandrake 8.0 is NOT affected by the 1024-cylinder limit. It supports hard drives up to 40 GB (if I'm not mistaken) so it doesn't matter how large your Windows partition is. (my windows partition is 10GB, and earlier verisons of LM WERE affected by this but not LM 8)
Also: after installing LM8, my computer had exhibited symptoms similar to yours.. only instead of letters, i had strange ASCII characters and colourful DOS blocks and such... looked like a dog's breakfast where my "Starting Windows..." screen used to be.
(the RAM count and rest of booting up was normal.) DON'T PANIC or do anything. Let it finish its course. For me anyway, this strange looking screen did not affect Windows or Linux in any way (although the first few times it's scary to see).
As long as LILO is properly installed you shouldn't have a problem. If linux is not accessible you should be able to get in using a boot diskette (with your linux kernel on it)
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