Author Topic: In deep trouble with Air-BOOT or what??  (Read 8678 times)

Einar Lygre

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In deep trouble with Air-BOOT or what??
« on: November 05, 2014, 11:39:34 am »
I don’t know what really happened, but after rebooting from Vista to eCS 2.1  I got this message.

AIR-BOOT !ATTENTION!
The code of AIR-BOOT is not intact any more.
Please boot via AIR-BOOT disc to restore AIR-BOOT.
System halted. Please press RESET.

AiR-Boot (1.1.0) user manual has a description of how to handle this situation. I followed it but got the same messages again and again. I must say that I installed version 1.1.0 while I had version 1.0.7 from before. At the end I installed the old version and then Air-Boot was up and running.

I then could boot eCS and was happy. I left the computer over night without closing down, ready to continue my work where I left (all programs closed). This morning I found this message on the screen:

AiR-BOOT v1.07 - © 1998-2011 M.Kiewitz, Dedicated......
Build Date: 6 May 2011 at 02:25:19

Boot disk is Huge   : No
eCS Install Phase 1   : NOT ACTIVE
Disks Found      : 2
Partitions Found   : 12

DISK 80H                                     DISK 81h
------------------                          ---------------------------
Cyls      :00003FFF                       Cyls      :00003FFF
Heads   :00000010                       Heads   :00000010
Secs      :0000003F                       Secs      :0000003F
SecsLVM   :0000003F                       SecsLVM   :0000003F
LBA Secs   :1DCF32B0                       LBA Secs   :74706DB0

Press TAB to return to the AiR-BOOT Meny!

The TAB did not respond. Shortly after a new message was displayed: SAVE ERROR!

After restarting/rebooting I got an other message before the last one described above

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 082)
Copyright © 1997-2000  Intel Corporation

For Realtek RTL8111B/8111C Gigabyte Ethernet Controller v.2.11 (07:...
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.


This message was on the screen for a few seconds and was then replaced by the first described message.

One comment to this message is that I don't use the Realtek card even if it is installed in the computer. I could never make it work.
Please! Can anyone tell me how to proceed from here?

Einar

Sigurd Fastenrath

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Re: In deep trouble with Air-BOOT or what??
« Reply #1 on: November 05, 2014, 12:40:52 pm »
Hi,

I would guess this is more a diskfailure rather than a problem with Airboot.

Something is wrong with the disk so Airboot can not act as it is used to - it resides in the MBR of the Disk.

That the PC is looking for a bootable device via your LAN card is another sign for this, because of the BIOS not recognizing your HDD it tries to boot from a different location. You might enter BIOS and there you will find a menue where you can see wich boot devices are enabled - "Booting via LAN" seems to be enabled as well.

I would suggest to check your HDD with a bootabel Linux System or the Diskchecker with eCS.

HtH

Sigurd

I don’t know what really happened, but after rebooting from Vista to eCS 2.1  I got this message.

AIR-BOOT !ATTENTION!
The code of AIR-BOOT is not intact any more.
Please boot via AIR-BOOT disc to restore AIR-BOOT.
System halted. Please press RESET.

AiR-Boot (1.1.0) user manual has a description of how to handle this situation. I followed it but got the same messages again and again. I must say that I installed version 1.1.0 while I had version 1.0.7 from before. At the end I installed the old version and then Air-Boot was up and running.

I then could boot eCS and was happy. I left the computer over night without closing down, ready to continue my work where I left (all programs closed). This morning I found this message on the screen:

AiR-BOOT v1.07 - © 1998-2011 M.Kiewitz, Dedicated......
Build Date: 6 May 2011 at 02:25:19

Boot disk is Huge   : No
eCS Install Phase 1   : NOT ACTIVE
Disks Found      : 2
Partitions Found   : 12

DISK 80H                                     DISK 81h
------------------                          ---------------------------
Cyls      :00003FFF                       Cyls      :00003FFF
Heads   :00000010                       Heads   :00000010
Secs      :0000003F                       Secs      :0000003F
SecsLVM   :0000003F                       SecsLVM   :0000003F
LBA Secs   :1DCF32B0                       LBA Secs   :74706DB0

Press TAB to return to the AiR-BOOT Meny!

The TAB did not respond. Shortly after a new message was displayed: SAVE ERROR!

After restarting/rebooting I got an other message before the last one described above

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 082)
Copyright © 1997-2000  Intel Corporation

For Realtek RTL8111B/8111C Gigabyte Ethernet Controller v.2.11 (07:...
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.


This message was on the screen for a few seconds and was then replaced by the first described message.

One comment to this message is that I don't use the Realtek card even if it is installed in the computer. I could never make it work.
Please! Can anyone tell me how to proceed from here?

Einar
« Last Edit: November 05, 2014, 12:43:21 pm by Sigurd Fastenrath »

Einar Lygre

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Re: In deep trouble with Air-BOOT or what??
« Reply #2 on: November 05, 2014, 02:18:23 pm »
Thank you for your answer.

One of the many thing I did was to check the disks with DFSee. Is I understand  there is nothing wrong. I can boot from eCS installation CD. Then I have access to all disks and partition. I have copied files to memory sticks to be able to work on another PC (this one).
The BIOS shows that booting via Lan is disabled. One person has told me that the message about Realtek probebly shows up every time I boot, but is displayed so fast that I haven't seen it. The message is correct, there is no cable in that card. I use an Intel network card and the BIOS don't see that.
Then Air-BOOT starts, but displays the message about the disks. It doesn't say that anything is wrong and in a way ask me to continue with AiR-BOOT by pressing TAB and then displays the message: SAVE ERROR.
I can't find anything about these messages from AiR-BOOT and why they are displayed.

Now my next question is: How can I activate the old IBM boot manager. It still resides in a partition but is disabled.

guzzi

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Re: In deep trouble with Air-BOOT or what??
« Reply #3 on: November 05, 2014, 07:52:09 pm »
If you are certain the disk is ok, try booting from the eCS cd, go to a command prompt and run lvm /newmbr .
That should give control back to the bootmanager. After that you can reinstall airboot.

Einar Lygre

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Re: In deep trouble with Air-BOOT or what??
« Reply #4 on: November 11, 2014, 05:21:14 pm »
The problem is solved, and I think other should like to know how.
I can't tell why I got the problem, but I did all I could according to the instructions. At the end the PC only booted Win Vista and AirBoot did not show up. I have two disks. One with Vista and one with eCS. According to the instruction AirBoot would be installed on the first disk. I never tried to tell the installation program where to install AB. I just got the info that the installation was succesfull. The first disk was the one that was installed when I bought the PC. Here Vista was installed.  I later bought a new disk (SDD) and there I installed eCS 2.1.
Then a couple of weeks ago the problems came as described earlier.
The solution was to go into the BIOS and change the booting sequens: disks, CDs and so on. Now the SDD disk with eCS 2.1 is the first disk where the PC try to boot from. May be this is the disk where AB is? I guess so. Well, why did all this happend? An explanation I have got is that the internal battery(at least 5 years old) (for holding settings etc) in the PC shold be replaced. The setting was lost somehow and the PC would start from disk 1 where there was no bootmanager, but only Vista.
May be there is another explanation or that something else is wrong, but anyway I now can boot the OS I want from AB.

Sigurd Fastenrath

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Re: In deep trouble with Air-BOOT or what??
« Reply #5 on: November 13, 2014, 08:12:26 am »
May be there is another explanation or that something else is wrong, but anyway I now can boot the OS I want from AB.

Well done! And while Ir read your explanation the OS/2 User meeting in Cologne last year came to my mind - I had my X230T there, equipped with the usual SATA HDD plus an MSATA SSD I added (in the MiniPCIe Slot that is there for i.e. the UMTS/HSPA card). And I had the same trouble, till I changed the boot order in BIOS back to the SATA HDD, where Airboot resides, but all the Operating Systems are on the SSD.

If I remember correctly I was not able to install Airboot Manager on the SSD it always went in the MBR of the HDD (May be someone knows to tell Airboot in that case to go to the HDD one wants it to go)
So, even if all the Operating Systems are on the SSD I had to choose the HDD to boot first.