Check your BIOS settings related to how the HDs are set up.

Hiya,

sorry for the delay in replying, but I've been away.

All of the HD set up was fine - checked everything!!

I came to the conclusion that there must be some quirky dislike between my system and Kubuntu & Mandriva because I have now managed to install Ubuntu Dapper and love it!! (I should also mention that my 'newbieness' has meant that I manage to mess the install up by 'exploring & tinkering' and had to reinstall it again!! haha)
I have since tried to install Kubuntu and Mandriva and they still wont work - I have no idea why, but I am more than happy so far with my Ubuntu and looking forward to the day when I am Linux savvy enough to be able to resign my Windose to status of spare OS in cae the other one breaks!!

Thank you for all the help with this problem & I am sure I will pop back up again with some "How do I... " or "What does this do..." type of question on some other part of the forum!!

Jonny B Happy :-)

I was a little frustrated with Linux once I started, but now that I've been using Linux...I won't go back to windows. It's a challege learning with Linux

Exactly, it is a challange. I can assure you, the challange you can keep on for a long time unless you become a geek, and becoming a geek in Linux is also another challange.
regards
anindyanuri

A good reason for unix being complicated is that it makes the unix computer labs empty .

When I first started linux I was thinking that the distributions should work together and have more standards on file structure; I still think this way but I don't mind about how some files would be in different locations depending on distribution.

Don't give up, newbies.
You will love linux after several months of frustration and struggling (sounds bad). But Linux is such a good OS, much better than windows.
Also, i just can't believe some of the software in Linux is free (as in free beer and freedom!!)
Just keep using it and try to get help wherever you can, you will overcome the difficulties of using Linux, but eventually, you will love it.

I has had my Ubuntu on VMware on XP, been tinkering for a while. Then one day I has found my "MyDocuments" folder have disappear from the "My Computer" list...I'm thinking of reinstall the whole xhit. I think I will try it on my older computer instead.

I was a once. I stuck with it. GNU/Linux is now my primary operating system. I'll never go back to that "other" operating system.

greenshade9, if you were "a very experienced computer user" as you claim to be, you would have never gone back to Windows. You don't know what you are talking about.

Relax now... he must have meant he was an experienced Windows user. Linux and Windows are two different OSs, and it is totally understandable if someone who knows Windows well struggles with Linux.

I took the middle road: dual booting. I use linux most of the time, but there are still things that absolutely require Windows.

I've been using Linux for about 5, maybe 6 years now. It was frustrating at first.
I build pcs, this one has three hard drives, with Xandros desktop 4 on the first (trying it out), Loser XP Pro on the second and SuSe 10.2 on the third.
I use Loser only to play the games I have, but for everything else, I use Linux .
It's fun trying different distros. I haven't used Loser for several years now except for the games.
For newbies, Linux is nothing like Microsoft....for starters it's HONEST. It's like learning to drive, you start with an old clumker (MS) and work up to a Porsche (Linux). So stick to it, you'll be glad you did.

no definitely stick with it! you wont regret it once you know more about it!!

This seems like an intereting thread, so here it goes....

i have been using linux for about 6 months now... before that i had twice started and given up on linux. The first time was with red hat 9.....(it was such a long time ago)...that experiment lasted not more than 2 weeks. But i really started using linux with mandriva... and thats the distrbution i have stuck to. I have also tried using Fedora Core 5,6, Ubuntu etc, but my long term usage distribution is mandirva.
What drove me off linux (and other distribution) was the lack of a centralized location for managing different configuration options. i know this sounds a lot like what a windows user would want, but Mandriva control center (configure your computer) does make life a lot easy since i can now easily configure most of my applications.
Another problem is the configuration of drives (wireless any one). I influenced three of my friends to shift to linux (2 are now using mandriva, and the other one uses Fedora Core 6). But all of them (including me) have faced a lot of probs with the drives issue.

What i think is that although there are various UI based tools now avaiable to perform installation s and configurations, still a newbie has to wade through a surprising number of text files with an alarming frequency. Thats what puts most ppl off..

As far as i am concerned, well i have survived 6 months and have finally a distro set the way i like it so life is good.

One last thing: Another major source of frustration my friends expressed is how tricky some very very simple looking tasks can be....
For example, if you multiple users, and you want to give them all the permission to mount any USB harddisk (External), it gets tricky fairly quickly. A single disk may have multiple partitions, so you can not place entries before hand in /etc/fstab. What do you do in this case??? I am sure there are solutions for things like this, but they are not most easy to find and thats what bothers ppl most.


Ne ways, i think all you need is a bit of patience with linux and once you get hang of things, it really is a wonderful new experience.


Soory if i steered off topic somewhere during the post

but many time people are selling their "control panels" for the desktops ... !!


//what a world we have ... and we are talking about quality ...


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