Hello everyone,
Sorry for this long letter, but i have to explain this properly.
here is my dillema....

I used to have win xp on my laptop, then i partitioned my hard drive using partion magic and installed mandrake10.0. Both co-existed quite nicely.
Then i decided to install redhat 7.2 because of its compiler (2.96) for a project i am doing in school. (I tried to get gcc 2.96 for mandrake10.0 but no success so far).

I installed redhat 7.2 on my desktop machine at home, along with win xp and well, i was disappointed that i couldn't see/mount my win xp NTFS c- drive, and i can't use a usb key and it doesn't seem to have cd-burner software, so there seems to be no way to transfer files out of redhat. (Unless i am missing something??)

Anyway, so I figured if i installed redhat 7.2 in my laptop (which already had the mandrake alongside xp) I would be able to see my mandrake drives which has a lot of files needed for the project, and thus mandrake can see all the drives for windows and redhat.

OK, so i partioned the hard drive again, and I installed redhat, with the grub bootloader (which overwrote the lilo that came with mandrake) and hoped for the best....

But unfortunately, redhat did not recognise my video card which is the ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000/9100 IGP. So now when i boot into redhat, i get a text login screen. No GUI. I tried to run Xconfigurator with no success.

Also, i no longer can boot into mandrake, only xp and this text based redhat, which i seriously do not want to work with!!

My questions are....
is it possible i can get redhat 7.2 to work with the video card mentioned above?
and how can I change the grub bootloader menu so that i can see the mandrake?

(I have knoppix which tells me which hda drives the red hat and mandrake are installed on. knoppix compiler is 3.3.3 so i can't use it for the project)

Or should i just delete the red hat partition? (If i do that, i will keep looking for a suitable 2.96 compiler for the mandrake). How can i get mandrake to be able to boot again? I really don't want to lose my files!!

Thanks again for ANY advice!!

LJ

As far I know redhat don't support NTFS file system, u have to install a patch for it. just search and install and even then you can only browse the NTFS but cant write on that.
Answer some questions of mine.
At the boot prompt what its showing now means the OS list? Is mandrake showing there?
Post the output of the commands <fdisk -l> and the contents of your grub.conf file of redhat and specify which partitions are used by mandrake and which by redhat.
Dont yet delete the redhat partition.

-Tanveer

Hi!
Thanks for replying!
Ok well, mandrake is not shown in the grub bootloader OS list.
And this is the output of <fdisk -l>:

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 3648 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes


Device boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1275 10241406 7 NTFS
/dev/hda2 1276 3468 19061122+ f win ext
/dev/hda5 2361 3116 6072538+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda6 1276 1281 48132 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 1282 2360 8667036 83 Linux
/dev/hda8 3117 3179 506016 82 swap
/dev/hda9 3180 3648 3767211 83 Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order


*****************************************

Note: Under System, for dev/hda1 there was HPFS/NTFS (I just shortened it for space) and for dev/hda2 System there was Win95 Ext'd (LBA)

I installed redhat 7.2 in dev/hda7 and mandrake in dev/hda5. dev/hda6 is /boot for red hat. /dev/hda9 is my home user drive for mandrake.

Ok, I will post grub. conf in another post.

LJ

Hi again,
I am sorry the table above came out like that, I had put spaces between each column...I hope it can still be understood....

LJ

This is the grub.conf file

#grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
#Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
#NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0, 5)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=dev/hda7
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,5)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=dev/hda7 hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.7-10.img
title windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Ok, but remember i cant open a text editor and edit the grub.conf because the red hat doesn't recognize the video card, therfore no gui

Any help here is really appreciated...thank you!

LJ

Lets first bring back your mandrake.

Mount /dev/hda5 in redhat with the mount command and then open the /boot/grub/menu.lst to see the partition table of mandrake and use that partition redhat grub.conf file for mandrake.
Also post the contents of grub.conf file of mandrake after mounting that in redhat.

-Tanveer

hi....
um where does redhat mount dev/hda5?

I used the command mount -t dev/hda5....and i don't know where it is!

thanks for your help!

OK, now this is worrying....
I created a directory using mkdir in /mnt called mandrake and i was planning to mount dev/hda5 there, but when i used the command

mount -t ext3 dev/hda5 /mnt/mandrake

Red hat is saying dev/hda5 does not exist!

I seriously think i should just delete this redhat, but then i don't know what would happen with grub bootloader and i don't want windows to be unable to boot!

what do u make of this?

did you try mount -t ext3 /dev/hda5 /mnt/mandrake ?

Also, the Knoppix Live CD would be your friend in situations like this. It should be a synch to access and edit your data using Knoppix.

Ok, i jus gonna remove the red hat. I tried to use Knoppix to edit the grub.conf file in redhat, but it won't let me. So. I guess that is that.
I may have to re-install mandrake too. I will just copy the files i need from mandrake to windows in Knoppix and then do a clean re-install.

Thanks for all your replies.

LJ