On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 11:49:05AM -0400, Ken Heard via talk wrote:
So I downloaded Knoppix 8.2, burned it to a DVD. It did indeed boot the offending computer. I was able to access my /home directory.
I then tried again to boot the computer from the hard drives which have Jessie installed. (There are two hard drives which form a RAID1 device.) This time the boot completed, no more 99s!
During subsequent bootings from these drives however, using both the installed Jessie and the Knoppix, after the message 'Verifying DMI Pool Data ...' was displayed it was a long time before they were detected. So it is possible that those drives, or perhaps one of them, are close to failing. They have been in use since 2011. Testing them is consequently next on my troubleshooting my agenda.
A delay after the DMI pool data message is usually a case of a dying disk or corrupt boot sector. -- Len Sorensen