Went out this morning for coffee, as usual, and also as usual, was digging change out of my pocket on the way, so I could just plunk it down, pour my coffee, and get out. But, I dropped some coins and stopped to pick them up. I found two, but was pretty sure I heard 3 drop. Anyway, went on and got my coffee. Then, I thought of something: my USB stick. I hadn't felt it in my pocket when digging around. It must be back there in the dark, on the side of the road. So went and retraced my steps. Took me a few times back and forth, but now that I was looking for the right shape—rectangular, not round—it jumped right out at me. Didn't have anything confidential on it, but it was pricey, around USD25 if I recall correctly. And I had just gotten it to where it could boot the UBCD rescue disk, using the syslinux.cfg stanza:
KERNEL memdisk INITRD ubcd539.iso APPEND iso
It was necessary because I had updated the file C:\extlinux.boot.dat but the Windows bootloader was looking at C:\extlinux.mbr.dat, which no longer pointed to the LILO second-stage loader. So I got the dreaded L 99 99 99..., the Linux equivalent of the Windows BSOD.
Had I known that's what the problem was, I could have fixed it from coLinux under Windows. But I didn't realize it until I had booted Parted Magic and was putzing around.
last updated 2021-04-05 16:35:36. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com