RAID, filesystems, unclean shutdowns, distros, and more...
 

Hey all. I'll try to keep this short, but I already have a feeling that it won't be.

I'll start off by saying that I know *very* little about Linux. I tried SuSE about three years ago, for about a week. I did very little with it. I primarily used KDE and its accompanying applications: Konqueror, some e-mail client, xmms, and that was about it. I didn't get into it.

Then I tried Mandrake 9.-something about another year or two later. Same thing happened. Used it for a couple days and that was all.

Present: I have an old Packard Bell sitting next to my Windows box. I installed Mandrake 10 Community on it. I typically use it by running PuTTY on my Windows box. When shutting it down, I use the "halt" command, and hit the power switch about 5 minutes later. Whenever I boot it back up, I receive the "system was shut down uncleanly" message and am forced to run a chkdsk (I believe that's what it's called). What may be causing this?

I am also experiencing difficulty setting up RAID on a fileserver at work. I'm using a PCI Promise FastTrack RAID card with two Seagate 160 GB drives in a RAID 1 setup. Same operating system as above - Mandrake 10 Community. When I get to the point where I have to setup the partitions, it's seeing two separate drives: hde and hdg. I have absolutely no idea how to set this up. From my understanding, Linux cannot boot off of a RAID partition. How should I go about partitioning these drives? From what I've read, the boot partition would have to be on a separate drive or partition that *isn't* a part of the RAID array. Almost defeats the purpose of RAID, doesn't it? Or am I missing something?

Last two questions: where would you guys recommend that I start if I want to seriously learn Linux? Are there any good books or online documentation? I don't want to flood this entire forum with my posts. :)

Last question - and one that may cause debate - what distro would you recommend I use, as a beginner? Mandrake 10 Community is nice, but it's also a beta. I was thinking about trying Fedora, Debian, or the final release of Mandrake 10. Who knows?

Well, thanks in advance for your help.

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Last question - and one that may cause debate - what distro would you recommend I use, as a beginner? Mandrake 10 Community is nice, but it's also a beta. I was thinking about trying Fedora, Debian, or the final release of Mandrake 10. Who knows?
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http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=20451


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Last two questions: where would you guys recommend that I start if I want to seriously learn Linux? Are there any good books or online documentation? I don't want to flood this entire forum with my posts.
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http://www.tldp.org
With good stuff on raid setup, also.


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Present: I have an old Packard Bell sitting next to my Windows box. I installed Mandrake 10 Community on it. I typically use it by running PuTTY on my Windows box. When shutting it down, I use the "halt" command, and hit the power switch about 5 minutes later. Whenever I boot it back up, I receive the "system was shut down uncleanly" message and am forced to run a chkdsk (I believe that's what it's called). What may be causing this?
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Did you try to use the shutdown command, instead of halt? Also, you might try to check what output msgs are given while halting. Post'em here specially the last ones, which are likely where mdk locked.