Hello everyone I'm new to this forum as you can see. I have a problem and here it is.

I have a system with windows Xp pro and I installed linspire on a seperate drive....and for some reason when the install of Linspire was done and I restarted it went to windows and I can't get to the Linspire at all.....it didn't set up my dual boot.....soooo what my question is what do I do now so that I have my dual boot???

windows is install on raid 0 the array is 2 80gig Western digital sata drives
linespire is installed on a maxtor 30gig ata drive


If there is any other info that is need let me know. Thanks

Ed

*EDIT* I don't really have any attachment to Linspire.....I just heard that it was easy to use....If there is a version of Linux that's easier and will solve my problem I'm all ears.

I don't know much of this Linspire Distribution of linux, and if it is giving you booting problems i would suggest to try something more common and used like mandrake. i personally like mandrake for it's friendly installation and easy-to-use interface. what boot-manager does linspire use? does it use lilo, grub or something else. usually you make this changes when installing.

Also because you have 2 hard-drives you can go into the bios and change it to boot of the second hard drive so you can access linspire and set up the boot manager

If you go to this thread
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...38#post1915338

there are several possibilities mentioned.

When you installed linspire how did you answer the question about overwriting your MBR?

Hello superwhat,
as Dommy is saying......while at the time of installation you should have put grub/lilo in the MBR and not in /root or somewhere else.....
As its directly booting into windows so it seems the most probable reason

ragards

Thanks for the replies everyone. When I installed Linspire there were only a few options
1) What drive to install the OS on....a partition or take over the whole drive
2) What the computer name will be
3) Admin account name and password
Those are the only options that I got when I was install the OS.....Besides that I don't know what type of boot manager there was or anything.....


Does mandrake auto create the dual boot??
What's my MBR?


I know all noooooobie question so thanks for bearing with me.

Ed

Hello,
Being not aware with Linspire...can't help u much.
if there is some forum for linspire then u must post it there.

MBR : master boot record. Here your bootloader resides ( i'm lying )
lying b'coz it depends which bootloader you are using.
grub: it completely resides there
lilo: it keeps a "pointer" like thing in mbr

so when u make some changes to grub, u don't need to re-run it. On the other hand when u make some changes in lilo u have to rerun it # /sbin/lilo (enter )

regards

yes i used mandrake and when installing it asks you what you want to be able to boot to. You should try mandrake it is very newbie-friendly and the installation is very easy and complete. it doesn't automatically do the dual boot but when installing it will ask you whether you what it or not.

Regards

I've spent the entire day trying to get Mandrake to create the dual boot screen and so far no luck.....Could it be because I have windows on my sata raid0 and mandrake on the ata slave drive??? don't ask why it's on the slave drive.....it's not physically connected as a slave...it's the master on the chain. Anyway, is there any information that you guys need in order to help? Thank you guys for your help.

Ed

Hello,
The master and slave probably should not create problem....at least with mandrake.
Tell me one thing....did it ask for installing bootloader ( grub or lilo ) somewhere ???
if yes, where u installed it ?
if no, then what is the current status of your system. Which o/s you are being able to acess ???

regards

ruudra,
It did ask for a bootloader.... I've tried both lilo and grub and I installed it to the hdc and I've tried the hdd I blieve. The OS was installed on the hdd (but when I partition the drive so that I have a Fat32 partition so that I can share the drive with both OS's it creates hdd1, hdd5 and so on according to how many partitions are on that drive) I autoalocate the drive then I take the largest partition and split that, that's where the Fat32 partition is created
I am able to boot to Windows only.

Ed

I GOT IT!!!!!!
Thank you guys very,very,very much! You guys are great! Now I'm off to learn.

Ed

OK so what was he problem and how did you solve it, it might help others to have this knowledge shared

Ahh good point!! What I had to do was:
1) Install the boot loader on the same drive that windows was on. For some reason when I did that with grub it didn't work. Nothing would happen at all not even windows would start up.
2) So I did a reinstall for mandrake and then set the boot loader I set to lilo and set it on the same drive as windows and it worked.

I also made sure that windows was the default os.....I don't know Linux enough to go it alone and I have some apps that I can't get on linux that I need to have so....anywho

Now I'm trying to install a nvidia display driver buuut I don't know how to stop the x server....so I'm having problems with that. So if anyone could help me with that, that would be great! Thanks

Ed

CTL-ALT-F1 - F6 while X is running will give you access to 1 to 6 command login screens ie standard terminal screens.

To get rid of X do CTL-ALT-Backspace (or Backarrow key) that should drop you out into screen 1, if you want to startup in linux without X open the file
/etc/inittab and change the line (note the level 2 is from Ubuntu usually its 5)
# The default runlevel.
id:2:initdefault



a runlevel of 3 is usually the non X, you may need to try different values but don't use 6 as thats the shutdown runlevel.

how do I long in as root??? I'm guessing that's the reason why it's not letting me to save changes I've made to that file.

Ed