HELP!!! L 99 99 99 99 99........

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Originally Posted by ssj2kite

Um, some help getting Smart Boot Manager to work? It confuses the life out of me ;-;

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Strange, it's so easy i'm not sure what you might want explained. I'll give it a shot, but you might want to try asking a question.

For making a boot floppy: Start a "DOS box", do not run it directly from windows. Run it once. look at the options it prints out. You should see options that let you select a language and that let you install it to floppy. Insert a blank floppy in the drive, type the installer name with the options that tell it to write to floppy, In a few seconds you have a SBM floppy that you can use to boot a CD on a computer where the BIOS does no support that.

For installing it on the hard drive MBR: do the same steps as above, but use the command line option to install to the first hard drive.

In either case you reboot and run SBM from a floppy or hard drive MBR. A simple text menu is displayed. Select the first CD drive to boot the CD. Select the first hard drive partition to boot the OS installed there (don't select the hard drive itself if you instaled to hard drive, that just reloads SBM).

That's really all there is to it.

That would work, but all I can run right now is LiveCD Knoppix 3.8, if I could access windows to run DOS I wouldn't have the problem I currently have right now.
Or maybe if I knew exactly what you meant by ""DOS box", do not run it directly from windows", because I don't think I can run DOS outside of windows @_@ *is still a newb*

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Originally Posted by ssj2kite

That would work, but all I can run right now is LiveCD Knoppix 3.8, if I could access windows to run DOS I wouldn't have the problem I currently have right now.
Or maybe if I knew exactly what you meant by ""DOS box", do not run it directly from windows", because I don't think I can run DOS outside of windows @_@ *is still a newb*

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I had assumed that you had access to DOS and/or Windows because you were trying to get SBM installed to a floppy and that's sometimes something people need to do on an older machine before they can get a CD to boot. I'm still a little puzzled by how you're running Knoppix, but I'm not too concerned about it.

By "DOS box" I meant running DOS as a "shell" under windows, complete with the prompt. Under Win98 it's done by the Start menu -> Programs -> MS DOS prompt. Under Xp and other flavors of Windows the wording may be a little different but it's still there. If windows will not run at all, yes, you can still run just DOS. Versions of DOS even before Windows will boot from a floppy just fine. The Win 95 and 98 "recovery flopiess" that Windows wants to make when installed are bootable DOS floppiess with a lot of extra tools on them. If you just have XP then this gets a bit harder, but there are still options like The Free DOS project that can be used to make a legal free bootable copy of DOS that will run the SBM installer. This may be a bit harder to do if you don't currently have a working MS OS, so it's always a good idea to be sure that you make some kind of bootable DOS floppy before Windows dies, but I expect there is some way to make the floppy from inside Linux (maybe with Wine?).

If you go back to the SBM download page there are actually a lot of different installers available, the "hardest" part for some people might be selecting the proper installer for their system. I was assuming that you were trying to work with the installer intended for MS DOS and Windows. But if I recall right there was one or more installers that would run from Linux too. I haven't used them and so can't give you directions on use, but given the straight forward nature of the MS installer I expect that the installer for Linux should be just as easy to use.

Well, I got FreeDOS onto a floppy, and found the Smart Boot Manager thing, but I saw no options to fix my mbr or anything. except for one Restore Repvious MBR option, which didn't do anything, and I saw the "Install Smart Boot Manager" option, but it did nothing.

Then I ran it in DOS mode, and I tried fdisk /fixmbr, and other fdisk help things, but it didn't work.

So, you know the command to fix a master boot record in FreeDOS?

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Originally Posted by ssj2kite

..... I got FreeDOS onto a floppy, and found the Smart Boot Manager thing, but I saw no options to fix my mbr or anything.....

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When the sbm installer is run with the option to install it to floppy (-d 0), it installs SBM to the MBR. It's not going to "fix" your MBR, whatever that means, except in the sense that it will install a pretty hand boot laoder there, overwriting whatever else was there. There are other options (as you already know if you followed the above instructions), and one of them allows the user to make a copy of the current MBR that could be rewritten later. But if you don't already have such a backup copy of the MBR, nothing's going to "fix" it, except by installing something there. I'm sure there are other tools in FreeDOS that will write to the MBR, but I see no point in confusing the issue by pointing them out, they are not easier to use than this simple installer. If you really want to find them a Google search will uncover them quickly.

"and I saw the "Install Smart Boot Manager" option, but it did nothing."

That wouldn't work. It just did nothing.

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Originally Posted by ssj2kite

That wouldn't work. It just did nothing.

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Many other people recently seem to be having sucess with it, for example http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18436 and http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18476

And, of, course, I've done it myself both to a floppy and to a hard disk MBR. It does work. It is simple. My guess is that you are making some assumption about what some step is rather than reading the instructions. I could be wrong on that, but I have no real idea what I can do further to talk you through this.

Well, I tried installing SBM to all of my partitions, and none of them worked. I would make a new one, but QTparted won't let me, parted is in german or something, and tools that work on knoppix have a hard time resizing NTFS file systems to make a new partition

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Originally Posted by ssj2kite

Well, I tried installing SBM to all of my partitions, and none of them worked. I would make a new one, but ....

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You absolutely do not install SBM to a partition. You either make a boot floppy with it or you install it to the MBR of the first hard disk. But you do not install it to a partition. Where did you find any instructions telling you to install it to a partition?

Howdy All :)


Harry Kuhman wrote

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ssj2kite wrote
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Well, I tried installing SBM to all of my partitions, and none of them worked. I would make a new one, but ....
>>>>
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You absolutely do not install SBM to a partition. You either make a boot floppy with it or you install it to the MBR of the first hard disk. But you do not install it to a partition. Where did you find any instructions telling you to install it to a partition?
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There's an element of dejavue there :).

Something funny is going on with ssj2kite, he seems to have some difficultly in interpreting quite straight forward communications. And seems reluctant to describe exactly what steps he has actually taken. The response will always be either, very brief, or none.

And just going by his responses. his system, by now, must be a real mess.

Have you read the bit where he has XP on hda, installed Linux on hdb, and also resized XP to accomodate !!! (ummmm)

He really needs his original installation disks and to do a complete reinstall of XP from scratch. But says he can't get them. The data loss ... well, it is pain ... but ithink it will only get worse, not better. It may have to be one of those times when the old "rather a finger than the whole hand" sayings comes into its' own.

The more he intervens in his system, i think the more harm he is just going to do to himself.

The main reason i posted was because ... i know little about "Del Utility" partitions. But i have seen posts where they have caused problems in restoration attempts, lost bootstraps and such. I was wondering what you might think on that as the OP has such a partition as his first primary on hda ?!

jm

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      If your free, and you know it,
            clank those chains !

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I just remembered the why of me having a 99 99 99 error
it was the 80 pin cable on a semi ata66 hdd.
some hdd's, post ata33 and not really done proerly up to ata100 drives, don't report their stats correctly to BIOS when the 80 pin cable is used.
also, an ata33 with an ata66 drive ont he same cable can show weird results.

putting the newer drive on an older system back onto a 40 pin cable fixed the 99 99 99 error.
and it was "d'oh, wish I'd thought of that 5 hours ago!" time

Howdy marhleet

I guess you must mean, that the 66 hdd was backward compat with the 33, but the 33 wasn't forward compat with the 66 ... thus, having to use the 40 cable for both ...

Handy, i have to copy a whole lot of stuff over from an ATA33 drive to a new WD ATA100 drive this week. I was going to stick the 33 on the 100's cable.

I think you may have just saved me a lot of friggin around there marhleet, :) , thanks :)


jm

i think it's a bug in the older motherboard bios actually.
i've used 33 and 66 drives together, and even ata66 and cd-roms together.
but I've seen probs, at times, with the seagate 10gb drives (off ebay) (ex-xbox?) these drives behave weirdly.
possibly short changed internally by seagate as they were 'supposed' to be for a specific use and not generally for sale.
so the problem shouldn't have arrived.
but modders are a strange lot.

Hi marhleet

Ok, seems bargains arn't always so. Yes, iv'e got mixed drives at the moment with out any problems, but i tend to frett over anything new, for a whileat least anyway (grin).

Related, but a little off thread ... Something to watch out for ... I had a ata33 with a ata66, flashed back to ata33, just to stop windows from going into compatability mode, on a ata33 board. Linux would set them at udma2 at boot, but i also had a some script in /etc/init.d/local that was run at the end of boot which used hdparm to set dma settings. At the time i though it was a good idea, but it's not really neccessary. The kernel does it fine. But ... then i got a new maxtor ata133. The kernel matched it to the boards controller at boot with a udma2 setting, but then hdparm, via the script, reset it to it's highest value, 4 or 5 i think. It would be ok for a period, but once i started to do transfers ... bang, Total scramble. I had to reset to recover. The eventual result was a stuffed up disk (grin).

Always best to watch out for that with new drives i think :)

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don't report their stats correctly to BIOS when the 80 pin cable is used.
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I guess you mean, going by your later post, that, thats really to do with your buggy bios and funny disks at the time, rather than as a policy.

I believe the 80pin cable just provides for better earthing, and so, less emf/harmonic line interference in the cable during transferes.

It's a curious thing, isn't it :), even though the "99 99 99 99" Lilo message is saying it can't find it's secondary boot file(s), in a way it was quite correct !. Just that the most common reason wasn't.

What bios were you using at the time.


jm

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  -:  -:-  If the system is the answer, then the question
                      must have been really stupid  -:  -:-

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mine was in an existing smoothwall hdd, (p120) moved it to a new computer (pii) and hoped it would work fine with no action.
leaving the BIOS at defaults, on boot it had the 99 99 99 during boot phase.
then re-building from scratch didn't work either.
wasn't til later with either clocking it back in bios or using the 40 pin cable that it fixed itself and the lightbulbs over the head started going off :lol: 8)

Howdy,

Sounds like the bios was probably old, but probably not the culpret. Just the cables :)