Confused and feeling stupid
 

I've been searching for the answer to this for days with no luck- maybe looking in the wrong place.

I intend to do an install from hard disk of Mandrake 8.1 using files from ftpserver. In Mandrake folder there are two enormous files of 1.57GB containing identical files- RPMS and RPMS.cooker. Surely it can't be necessary to download both of these?

I don't have a cd burner otherwise I would download the ISO's; although I've read that WinImage can be used to extract the ISO to hd and can then be installed- does anyone know if this is correct?

I would be extremely grateful for any help, as I'm at wits end.

Thanks!

the cooker packages are the latest versions that are not stable enough for daily use, probably best to stay away from them.

What really stumps me is that the files in each folder appear to be exactly the same (RPMS and RPMS.cooker). If the cooker folder contains just development files, surely it wouldn't be identical to RPMS folder? I checked on other ftp sites and it seems to be universal.

Do you plan to upgrade, or make a fresh install?

If upgrading, you can mount the iso files on a mount point, and launch the upgrate.

If you want to make a fresh install, you will need to extract files from that image file (using something like winimage), create boot diskettes, restart the machine and follow instructions..

It's a fresh install, on space made by resizing windows partition.

If I use WinImage to extract ISO to hard drive I presume I extract to C:\ and then use hd.img on floppy?

Sorry to ask such plodding questions but I'm at the very bottom of the learning curve. I appreciate your help, thank-you!

huh,they are the same, they must not have started work on 8.2 yet. yep, go into the dosutils directory and click on rawritewin, and copy hd.img to the floppy. a simple cut and paste probably won't work, linux is picky about it's image files.

Thank-you everyone for the advice! Didn't download the cooker files and the install went just fine. Now I'm off out to buy a compatible modem.........

Get an external modem....(not usb).

:D What a day! Had internal modem (Conexant HCF PCI ) for which drivers are promised on Conexant.com, but couldn't wait; went out to get external modem and out of choice of about a dozen I picked up a Diamond 56k external USB modem. Get home and do research - find it's unsupported. Go and exchange modem for Creative Modem Blaster External modem, which is mentioned on Mandrake's 'Known Hardware' list.

Then I spent a couple of hours searching the net for mention of Linux drivers for new modem; turns out there's nothing- several sites explicitly state 'no Linux drivers available'.

Finally, I just plugged the modem in and tried to connect:) .

It works, and I'm sending this post from the Konqueror browser. Feeling VERY chuffed and a bit daft for underestimating Mandrake's self-cofiguration ability.

w00h00!
Welcome to the M$ free world of web surfing :)