halp! debian 3.0 machine's LILO refuses to LO LI. . .
the computer: Dell Dimension-L, 3 years old (Sept. 2000)
processor: Intel Pentium-III 667 MHz
RAM: 128 MB, 100 MHz
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 3.0
For a while now, my machine has been making some kind of clicking sound when it's thinking. (The closest I can come up with for what it sounds like is a pinball machine's flippers.) It'd been doing this mostly when I did things like trying to load several pages in Opera while SSH-ing to my university's system and starting GAIM. . . .
Last night, while I was out of my room, my university ethernet connection failed, and so I had a bunch of GAIM and Opera error messages about not being able to connect, and the machine was clicking like mad. After going to a console login to restart pppd, when I came back to X, everything froze. After several minutes of clicking, I successively tried Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X and Ctrl-Alt-Del to reset the machine; both failed. So I hard reset with the power button on the front of the machine. I realise this is pretty universally not recommended, but the machine was pretty convincingly not responding.
When I restarted the machine, LILO refused to load. I got the following screen:
L 01 80 02 80 80 80 80
(I was out of the room, so I don't know if the numbers came up one at a time or all at once)
I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del (after about five minutes) and got:
L 80
I used the power button to shut the machine down, and left it down for about seven hours. When I started it up again, I got:
LILO
Boot error 80.
(through all this the machine was still making this clicking noise, several times per second, except while the BIOS was loading, after which it started again.)
I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del (again after a few minutes) and got:
Invalid BOOT Diskette
Insert BOOT Diskette in A:
There is no disk in A:; there hasn't been for months, and I don't have a boot disk for this machine.
Does anyone know if there's any way to recover the machine, or will it be necessary to start over and re-install the OS?
processor: Intel Pentium-III 667 MHz
RAM: 128 MB, 100 MHz
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 3.0
For a while now, my machine has been making some kind of clicking sound when it's thinking. (The closest I can come up with for what it sounds like is a pinball machine's flippers.) It'd been doing this mostly when I did things like trying to load several pages in Opera while SSH-ing to my university's system and starting GAIM. . . .
Last night, while I was out of my room, my university ethernet connection failed, and so I had a bunch of GAIM and Opera error messages about not being able to connect, and the machine was clicking like mad. After going to a console login to restart pppd, when I came back to X, everything froze. After several minutes of clicking, I successively tried Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X and Ctrl-Alt-Del to reset the machine; both failed. So I hard reset with the power button on the front of the machine. I realise this is pretty universally not recommended, but the machine was pretty convincingly not responding.
When I restarted the machine, LILO refused to load. I got the following screen:
L 01 80 02 80 80 80 80
(I was out of the room, so I don't know if the numbers came up one at a time or all at once)
I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del (after about five minutes) and got:
L 80
I used the power button to shut the machine down, and left it down for about seven hours. When I started it up again, I got:
LILO
Boot error 80.
(through all this the machine was still making this clicking noise, several times per second, except while the BIOS was loading, after which it started again.)
I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del (again after a few minutes) and got:
Invalid BOOT Diskette
Insert BOOT Diskette in A:
There is no disk in A:; there hasn't been for months, and I don't have a boot disk for this machine.
Does anyone know if there's any way to recover the machine, or will it be necessary to start over and re-install the OS?
