Please Help! I just bricked my computer.

elmro

Senior member
Dec 4, 2005
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The scenario: I installed Mandriva (a long time ago) and duel booted with XP using LILO. I never used Mandriva because I could never get my Linksys USB Wireless adapter working (wired was never an option). Lo and behold the new Ubuntu comes out that promises wonderful support for wireless. My thinking was: remove the bootloader, load up xp, wipe the partition that had mandriva, and install ubuntu there.

Since I was always a linux newbie, I look up that I need to run lilo -u (device). Well I don't know what device I was supposed to specify. I executed lilo -u without any parameters (yes in hindsight I am an idiot).

Now when I reboot my machine I get the L 99 99 99 99 error. I can't boot into windows. I can't boot into linux. I can't boot from my master, my slave, my secondary, etc. I am hosed. And to top it all off, my cdrom drive motor is broken so I can't put anything in there.

I do have a disk drive, and a disk - hopefully I can find someone else who has a disk drive and hopefully they can make me an emergency XP disk. Even assuming they can do this - can anyone help me and tell me what steps I need to take so I don't have to boot from disk - or if possible avoid this whole diskette route at all?

Also where did I go wrong - what should my command have been? I have a primary and secondary IDE drive.

Any help is welcome - I am desperate.
 

tatteredpotato

Diamond Member
Jul 23, 2006
3,934
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You probably messed with your MBR, your XP install should be fine, it just doesn't know to boot it. I'm not familiar w/ Lilo, but you should be able to run a Live CD for Ubuntu to get to your Lilo Config Files. It's probably in /boot/lilo (thats a guess)
 

pcgeek11

Lifer
Jun 12, 2005
22,418
5,019
136
All you did was dump grub from the MBR. Boot from a floppy disk with win98 and run " fdisk /mbr " without the quotes of course. Then reboot

pcgeek11