I see a similarity in a problem I had a while back. New ram installed, windows is tolerant of bad ram, linux is not. try swapping your ram sticks around, better yet run a memory check, there are several on line for free. But swapping memory sticks will tell you if one is bad, especially in the # one slot. If you have a bad stick Linux will give you a fit. What I found out is , that the mem test on boot will show the correct amount of mem but that doesn't mean it is good. Hope this helps as a place to start looking. Dennis M.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Jordan Triebwasser
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 1:11 AM
To: Newbie Linux-Mandrake
Subject: [newbie] boot trouble
Here's the situation:
I had my mandrake box off for about a week, I go to turn it on yesterday and
it boots and just says LIL. I check the web, says it means it can't load the
descriptor table from the map file. I have no idea what that means, but it
gives some suggestions on how to fix it, like reinstall lilo.
So I attempt to boot from a floppy disk, and get an error msg, it says I
need 608k for low dos ram to boot, and hold down crtl next time I boot to
skip the error msg. I check the bios, and it says I only have 512 free. I
then attempt to boot off the cdrom, again same error.
I hold down ctrl on the next boot off the cdrom, I figure I'll just
reinstall it. But I get an error, something like
boot: could not find kernel linux. At the boot prompt I type 'rescue', and
get boot: could not find kernel rescue.
Mandrake is the only OS on that computer. The only difference when I turned
it off a week ago, till now was I plugged it into a kvm. A few days before I
shut it down, I installed more simms, bringing the total ram up to 128megs,
it worked fine for a couple days, but then I had to shut it off since I was
going away.
So my questions are, is it LILO that is screwed up, or the fact that I only
have 512 free is screwing up LILO. A friend said I could have a virus that
is eating up the low ram, or screwed up the MBR, so I ran norton and it
found nothing. I have no idea how much low ram I had before, but since I
installed mandrake 3 times, and was running for a month, I assume it was
more then 608, did 96 or more just rot away? I haven't changed anything in
the bios, or done anything with the kernel. I am really at a lose here.
Thanks for any help
- Jordan
