I have the same issue, as well. At first I thought it was my 'spare' test hard drives. You know, the ones. But I installed over my good 3.0.20 drive and got the same "LI_" message. Going to try 3.0.40 tonight.
i installed the new beta on my system. after installation finished successfull, i turned off the mashine and restarted. after initializing bios, the boot screen shows:
LI_
thats all. no transactions are possible... freezed.
I have a Pentium II 244 with 2 Realtec RTL1389 Ethernet Cards
I did some googling last night and found something that allowed me to boot.
After changing my BIOS settings for my hard drive to NORMAL, from AUTO or LBA, I could boot Astaro. When set to AUTO or LBA, the cylinder information wouldn't let LILO boot properly; something about the boot sector not being out-of-range and unreadable.
I didn't research what each letter of LILO represents, but appearantly each letter is a certain startup component.