I decided to install Suse 8.0 on one of my old doorstops, I mean computers just to see how well it would run. To make a long story short installing linux with a quad speed cd-rom sucks. It just takes way too long. On top of that the dang thing jamed when it asked for disk two. So I had to take it apart.

oops, is it working now? i'd hate to think you proved the people 'right' about your old computers

Well I finally got done and went through the config part. I gues I did something wrong because when it rebooted the picture was all garbled.

I guess I'll try reinstalling tomorow.

Good luck! From someone who's been struggling for several days now to get her distro running - keep your chin up!

I can't help you with SUSE (heck I couldn't even help you with Mandrake!) but I can be a cheering section for you!

WOOT! I have a cheering section!



I'm going to forget about the doorstop for now and put suse on my main system today. Thanks for the support.

I'm just about to put Mandrake on mine. Going to repartition the harddrives first, though. Make four new partitions, then try to get XP up and running on one, and Mandrake on the other. I'm stalling.. nervous.. lol!

Good luck!

Quick suggestion then sadie,

I put a new harddrive in my pc about 3 weeks ago, and thinking the "old route" downloaded the M$ boot disc's etc from their site, thinking that I would need them to initially format the harddrive - and take it from there.

Apart from the fact that the 4th or 5th M$ boot disc was corrupted (the down load was quick thanks to an adsl connection and the floppies were new), I then tried an old wind0w$ 98SE boot disc and got no where.

So desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel, I put the XP "recovery" disc in, and now have an "uncle Robert" because it installed properly, formatted the hard disc (vvv embarassed) and put me in a position to mess around with the partition with PM8 and then re-install my mandrake 9.0 (still waiting for the 9.1 powerpack dvd).

If nothing else, it taught me that the "install any micr0$0ft stuff first" seems to be a sensible manoeuvre.

regards

John

Hopefully, here are some helpful links.

# Freeware partitioning software
/dosutils/fips20 on install CD
Ranish Partition Manager
Tom's Root and Boot Floppy has Linux fdisk

# How do I uninstall Linux completely and keep/use Windows only?
How to Remove Linux and Install Windows 2000
How to Remove Linux and Install Windows XP
You can remove lilo from the mbr with
/sbin/lilo -u
You can remove grub or lilo from the mbr by booting with a Windows 98 boot floppy (at the prompt, type fdisk /mbr), or by using the Windows XP Recovery Console or the Windows 2000 Recovery Console

My problem is that whenever I put my Recovery CD in, it says, "Recovery CD Error" "PLEASE CONTACT COMPAQ" on a big red screen!

Btw, does anybody know, if you try to fdisk a computer with a linux partition, will it confuse fdisk? Everytime I tried to delete the Extended DOS partition, it would say there were logical drives there (even though when I would check, they wouldn't be visible or deletable).

Thanks!

Well, I suppose the stupid question is when you put the recovery disc in, does it give you the message straight away or when you try to boot from it?

Personally, I have never tried to just "run it", but I have done re-install's (yawn!)(and my one was supplied by "medion - because my pc is a "pcworld wonder cheapie!"


And if you get the message during reboot, I suppose it's time to ring Compaq/HP/whatever

regards

John

I get the message as soon as it boots into the recovery console. I found out why though. (I have another thread posted somewhere.. I think it's "linux, windows xp and fdisk.. but I'll recap here.)

The guy at Compaq told me the Recovery CD uses a disk image stored on drive D to reinstall the system. If you use fdisk on the harddrive (at all) it will corrupt the image. The only answer is to buy the "Quick Restore CD"s from Compaq (US $10.00). The quick restore cds work essentially the same way - look for the disk image and restore from it. But, if they find that the disk image is bad, the restore the disk image, then boot from it.

I think it's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. In order to keep costs down by not buying/offering full version software on their systems, they've made it monumentally difficult to recover from a problem. My only consolation is this:

There are plenty of computer newbies who get into this thinking it will be way easy and everyone will do everything for them. The current status of software and hardware in prebuilt system often supports this. However, one time of accidentally corrupting your disk image and having to somehow get someone to send you disks and then walk you through it will go a long way toward culling the herd! We'll either get people dropping out of computer use because it's "such a mess" or wanting to know more and thus increasing the population of people trying to really learn about computers, instead of doing for them.

So, despite my frustration, and my inability to do anything with system except sit and seethe until I calm down and can think clearly; I'm still trying to look on the bright side. What they're doing is stupid, but eventually will create positive changes in the population, if not in the distribution system.

It pays to roll your own computer system rather than buy those pre-installed things.

Of course, that was my experience as well. When I replaced my CDROM with a burner and then had to re-install, the CD refused to recognize the burner as a CDROM, so I couldn't re-install until I re-installed the origional CDROM.

Apparently, they set it up so that it could only be installed on the origional hardware.

I feel your pain.

Perhaps you could make the 2 partitions needed for your Windows OS and your Linux partitions before you install the picky OS (Windows).

You can at least install Linux that way and be using it until you get the extra CDs (outrageous!) you need. Hopefully the Windows install will see the windows partitions and ignore the Linux ones.

# Freeware partitioning software
/dosutils/fips20 on install disk
Ranish Partition Manager
Tom's Root and Boot Floppy has Linux fdisk

I think it has something to do with the fact that when you "activate" your software, it transmits a unique code to them that identifies your system via hardware, or something. I read something about it on one of the Microsoft White Papers. Essentially, this makes it impossible for MS software to be pirated, but also prevents us from making *legitimate* changes to our computers!

Actually Sadie,

Your snags sound slightly familiar. When I first decided to give linux a try, I was given a copy of suse 8 and after looking at the harddrive, it was formatted into 3 sections. The main windows formatted as ntfs, the recovery part, formatted as fat32 and another part (the name of which I have long forgotten).

The pc is a PCWORLD (pc chainstore) cheapie. Actually manufactured by medion (german I think).

In my ignorance, I just put the suse disc in and booted it. Initially it told me that I didn't/couldn't make the recovery partition bigger to accomodate the linux install, but told me that I could put it in the 3rd partition, so I told it yes and just clicked yes on any other questions/descisions that it asked me.

Luckily, it went in OK and ran fine - though I managed to damage the install and boot loader, so I just re-installed the xp and put mandrake over the top of the suse.

Since then, I have installed a new harddisc and all I did was put the supplied recovery disc in and told it to install, which it did and it didn't even ask for product activation or any crap like that. From there it was easy to install partition magic 8 and chop the disc up to make room for my mandrake install (9.0 until the 9.1 powerpack dvd arrives).

I often wondered the relevance of the "recovery" partition on the old hard drive, and never touched it in case it was something important that I might need if I managed to screw things up.

Since I don't have a "recovery" partition now and have proved to myself that I don't seem to need one, then bollocks, I won't bother wasting time and effort to replace it.

From your earlier comments, I can only suppose that it depends how the manufacturer installed and configured the machine in the first place, with a view of how much extra they can convince you to spend in getting problems sorted out.

I reckon that medion are just interested in producing ready to go desktop machines, and not so much on the aftersales support, hence the "recovery" cd is a pretty complete version and I can sort problems with little or no help.

regards

John