Hello!

I just installed Mandrake 10.1 community. I rebooted the computer and
it gets to the grub screen. I select 'linux' and it seems to try to execute
these lines..

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 failsafe acpi=ht resume=/dev/hda5
devfs=nomount

initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.img

and then the computer immediately reboots and I get the grub menu again.

There is no other os on the computer and I installed grub to the MBR.

It is an AMDK6-III 450 with 128 megs of ram
Any ideas??

thanks!
Judah

Any ideas what the problem is here?
I'm at a lost trying to figure out why the computer keeps
rebooting without starting linux...

If that is the only OS you have installed/are installing on the system, it strikes me as odd for you to have an hda5 partition. Majority of my comps are dual boots and I don't think any of them have five partitions on one hdd. Your best bet is to get a floppy boot disk partitioner -- I recommend a free partitioner called 'BootIt' which can be found on download.com.

It sounds like GRUB is trying to boot the wrong partition on your primary hdd (ex: trying to boot hda3 instead of hda1). Even though you could make changes directly within grub command line settings, I recommend you use a boot disk partitioner to situate the overabundance of partitions. Resize everything how you want it and reinstall Linux on the newly partitioned hdd.

Hello,

I have the same problem. I have tried several times to get my nearly installed Mandrake system to boot. The first few times I got the grub line. This last time I got the bash line, after I logged in. I start out with a menu that gives a choice between failsafe and linux boot. A few install attempts back I tried the "failsafe" and ended up with grub.
I tried the "drakeconf" line command and discovered that I have five partitions. I take it that "hda" is the Linux O/S way of saying "C". "D", "E", etc drive. (I get the KDE GUI and the live system when I boot a live CD Distro of Suse 9.1 evaluation CD. I see users all over the newsgroups asking for help with the "automatic", "easy" to boot up KDE 9.1.)
I install the 3 disk "automatic" "easy" Mandrake 10.1 Community and after several questions that are totally alien to someone new to the Linux world, when you reach the "install is finished" reboot stage, you are taken into a totally alien world.
Is there a way with bash that a user can view the Hard drive and what is on it? Evidently, Linux distro logical drives are not called 'C' , 'D', etc. Does the physical drive have a letter or name? Is there a way to view the directories and files on it?
I love what I saw of Linux with my Suse Live CD but I cannot print, save to floppy or install it onto my hard drive. Is there a 'key' book that explains Linux systems to an old Commodore Basic, Tandy and British Basic, MS-DOS Window person? Once I have a lever and a rock, I can leverage my way around. When I search the Net for Linux, mandrake, suse, GNOME, KDE, basics, I find chaos! A person has to click from one "promising" hit after another only to find extremely terse and generalized "tips" from a site owner who really wants to sell distro copies and penguin mugs and T-shirts. This gig reminds me of a sargeant with five years of combat in S.E. Asia who told a soldier right off the boat that filed stripping, loading, unjamming, firing the 50 cal heavy machine gun is "simple" & "easy" ..."I can do it in my sleep" Sure after Korea and Vietnam, I'll bet the 50 cal is very easy and simple. Then, there is the 35 year old math professor who tells a freshman, after 72 hours of trying & failing to compute the trajectory of a 6 pound cannon ball blasted by one pound of black powder: "It is simple."
I tried to start out by learning the components of a mainstream Linux O/S and found fine print lists that are over six foot long! Whew! This takes me back to early BBS days, when I invested hours figuring out, by trial and error and logic how to log on to a Wildcat BBS Computer, only to be greeted by a "Welcome to XXXX BBS" & a blinking cursor! The BBS world did not get with it until AOL was knocking them out with its comparatively easy icon & menu access to the WWW.
Is there is general purpose CD a person can get that lets you look at the hard drive and look around at what is there and thus figure out what is going on? My guess is an awful lot of novice and not so novice users are installing their "easy" & "automatic" install Mandrake 10.1 Community disks only to be greeted by grub or bash, not by any GUI interface.
I know very few heavy users of Windows XP who can figure out how to reinstall XP. I do not think they will be venturing out very oon to migrate to "easy" & "autormatic" install Mandrake 10.1.

J_Onyx29, use line spaces between your statments, makes for esier reading.

If you have a separate issue, make your own post

judah,

hda is the first hard drive hdb would be second.

the second partition on hda will be hda2, hda1 being the 1st partition, and hda being the boot sector.

Partitioning can complicate this because, the third partition may be an extended partition, placing redundant hd names like hda3 and hda4 out of use.

Summary, hda:boot sector, hda1:1st partition, hda2:2nd partition, hda5: 3rd partition. etc.

hdb may be a cd or dvd this could make the 2nd hd hdc or hdd.

If you only have one OS installed, install the bootloader to the MBR, instead of a partition. lilo or grub will still be stored to /boot folder.

I dug in last night determined to get Mandrake 10.1 to boot KDE desktop. I found some friends no go problem with 10.1 was caused by same problem.

You may want to consider re-installing Mandrake again. I would try this first. I am new to Linux but not new to computing or operating systems. After analyzing the situation and getting the definitions of some more Linux "world" lingo, I decided that the problem may be Mandrake install program is not very good at analyzing graphics "cards". Many PCs no longer have cards but proprietary mother board integreted sound and graphics electronics. Dell, the largest PC maker and seller in the world, ships many PCs with integreted mother board graphics - video electronics.

Evidently, if the installer cannot run your graphics hardware you end up with a bash or grub command line. Something that threw my friends and I since we never heard of either scripting utility. If you are familiar with the ole MS DOS batch files, they appear more powerful and similar but with a totally different "volcabulary." (autoexec and configure files were batch files).

I got my Dells and my friends computers to boot the desktop by trial and error, punting & logically trying different graphics choices (there are very few and the two Dell choices would not work for any of our Dells). We finally got working with a combination of the Intel choice ("Test" still sent us an error message). We decided to try having X load at start up. This did the trick. Once you get the KDE GUI desktop you may be able to figure your way around, which is what we are doing.

On a few systems, I found I could skip reinstall and just enter "drakconfig" at the command line. Somehow, we got into graphics drivers from there. Sorry, cannot remember exactly how.

Hope this points you in the right direction. This morning my friends found several posts scattered across the net, where professional ITs told users that they find a lot of users cannot get their Mandrake Community or Official 10.1 install to boot a desktop due to graphic driver problems. Beware that we are totally new to Linux OS, so I have explained how we stumbled around and got 10.1 to boot on 12 systems, mostly Dell Dimensions and Optiplexes, all with integreted motherboard graphics and sound.

OK, I read the entire post this time, (2 cups of tea and a smoke later) J_Onyx29. lol

No offence intended.

I seems to me that what we need is a few tutes on linux first, so as to begin getting an understanding of the foundation upon which the Individual Distributions are developed and run.

Firstly though, J_Onyx29, you seem to have far more experience with computing than I, so please be patient if I go around the block the oposite way.

The config file you want to get to, like the dos autoexec.bat/config.sys for hardware settings is in /etc

Back in a sec, switching to mandrake......

OK. /etc/X11/XF86Config. on some distros it's XF86Config-4 and xorg.conf is a very similar file. They're plain text, you may need to be root to save changes.

If you know your hardware specs and parameters, some info here... cd proc..lspci -v will show what hardware you have installed, then you may edit the conf files for a custom config. These are X parameters for the GUI

Some good tutes, in no particular order

Pocket-Linux-Guide.html.tar.gz a zip file of Pocket-Linux-Guide.html

The Linux Newbie Guide by Stan, Perter and Marie Kilmas "A VERY GOOD ONE"imho.

intro-linux.html.tar.gz a zip file of intro-linux.html

lfs.html.tar.gz a zip file of Linux From Scratch

lkmpg.html.tar.gz another handy document

Kernel Rebuild Guide.txt by Kwan Lowe May explain or show how to get those dells graphics modules installed.

Those look at linux, next will be to find info on your distro.

These pages, the Tutorials section at the top of this page and magazine articles. Google is your friend.

Hope this helps, I have all of these bookletts/tutes, and I was able to download them from the web freely. (no cost)

I have only been really learning computers since win95 came out.

I used them at work before that.

I've been learning Linux for 1 year this week.

Cheers, I know you'll get a lot from those books I mentioned. Hope to converse with you all again.