Mandrake 9.2 Installation Issues

MentatMM · 11-25-2003, 11:31 PM

I've posted on a few other forums to no avail, so I'll just quite myself instead of retyping everything.

Quote:

For you to understand my problem, I must first tell you a little story; a story of a linux newbian attempting to install Mandrake 9.2.
I recently purchased Mandrake 9.2 (linuxcd.org) and a secondary hard-drive to give linux its own home. I couldn't figure out how to install it to my secondary hard-drive, so I simply took the primary hard-drive (WinXP) out and installed linux onto the now primary hard-drive. The installation seemed to go well. I then switched the linux hard-drive back to secondary and reconnected my primary hard-drive, but when I boot the computer there is no bootloader menu (meaning that to get back and forth between OS's I must go into my BIOS and change the boot drive each time). I don't want to do this (I want to have a bootloader menu where I can choose which OS to boot to, each time I reboot).

I have 2 questions regarding this situation.

1. Is there a way to get the bootloader menu working without having to reformat the hard-drive (which I have no clue how to do).

2. Regardless of the answer you give to the question above, how would I go about reinstalling linux? Do realize that I'm only familiar enough with linux to know how to type in my username and password at this point, so dumb down your technical jargon please (I can hold my own in Windows, but this linux stuff is alien to me).

Let me know if there is anything else you may need to know about my problem in order to help me. Thanks in advance.

Quote:

It does indeed appear that option 2 would be best, but how do I go about reinstalling Mandrake with the XP hard drive connected? I couldn't figure it out the first time, which is how the whole problem started. I load the Mandrake installation CD under WinXP, and choose "Install Mandrake Linux", but when the computer reboots (which it requires), it just boots back up into WinXP or if I switch hard drives via my BIOS, it loads the linux prompt (which I know nothing about at this point). I can't seem to find any helpful (to me) documentation on installing Mandrake to a secondary hard drive. A friend of mine told me that I must have done something wrong during the installation if I'm getting a linux prompt, instead of it auto-loading the GUI. :/

Quote:

I now have my Mandrake hard drive as primary and my XP hard drive as slave. The computer automatically boots into Linux, but the Mandrake installer never pops up and I get a linux page loaded with errors (where I would normally get a Linux command prompt). I also tried switching over to XP and selecting "Install Mandrake Linux" again, but it just boots back into XP. I'm so confused. :/

I know that's alot to read (I apologize), I just wanted to save people the time of repeating things that I've already done. I'm a total linux newbie and any help would be appreciated. Everything that I've done above has been recommended by folks on other forums.

kilgoretrout · 11-26-2003, 12:32 AM

Without going into a lot of stuff that you probably won't be comfortable doing, let's try a quick fix. Put your windows drive back in it's original position and slave the linux drive like you originally planned. Make sure the jumpers on the hard drives are set properly and if your not sure about this post back. Boot up and you should go into windows.

So far so good. Reboot and go into your bios setup and make sure you have set the boot sequence order to be floppy drive first, cdrom second and your windows hard drive third. Make any changes that are necessary, place the mandrake install cd-1 in your cdrom, exit the bios setup saving the changes and reboot.

That should cause you to boot from the cdrom drive and you should go into the mandrake installation. The install program will detect the previous installation and ask you whether you want to do a new installation or upgrade. Choose the "Upgrade" option. Mandrake will take some time examining the previous installation and will hopefully edit all your configuration files to accomodate the new position of your hard drive. It will go quicker than last time since your not installing any new packages. You will eventually get to the boot loader installation screen. Make sure the boot loader is being installed to your mbr which is the default.

Proceed with the installation to it's end and reboot. If everything went well, the boot loader screen should come up and you will have the option to boot into "linux" or windows.

tearinox · 11-26-2003, 12:39 AM

2. if you would like to get rid of linux (or windows for that matter) you can use
fdisk - windows
cfdisk - linux, easier to use
fdisk - linux, better read man pages

those are partitioning tools. Your hard drive is like a piece of paper and partitioning is cutting those different pieces of paper into different sections.
When you format, you are drawing the layout of what is going to be there. For example, ext2 for linux and fat32/ntfs windows

to format:

format c: - windows
and linux not sure, i always have the install programs on the install cd to do it for me.

hope i could have shed some light

tearinox · 11-26-2003, 12:43 AM

http://www.iceteks.com/articles.php?...cle=linux&p=3&

this guy talks about some of that stuff a bit, just like to support him

MentatMM · 11-26-2003, 09:25 AM

I've taken the A+ hardware/software classes so you'd think that I'd be smart enough to know to change my boot sequence so my CD-ROM boots first (I think that deep inside I have an overwhelming fear that I'm going to accidentally erase my XP partition). :/

I did what you said, changed the XP hard drive back to master, Mandrake back to slave, changed the boot sequence so that my CD-ROM boots before my hard drive. Everything seemed to go peachy with the upgrade, but I never got a window or anything that regarding the boot loader (which means that I don't know if it installed to mbr or not). Maybe Mandrake tried to make things too user-friendly in 9.2 and doesn't give you the option to alter the boot loader installation? When I reboot, there's still no boot loader screen (boots straight into XP). :/

So I'm still having a few problems that I need help with, if you folks wouldn't mind.

1. I still don't have a boot loader screen and would like to have one (just can't see myself changing back and forth through BIOS each time).

2. When I load Mandrake I get a linux command prompt. I've had friends tell me that if I did my installation correctly, a generic GUI should be loading. I'm not seeing any GUI, is there a command I need to type? I'm a little afraid that I'm not getting a GUI because of my video card (Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb All-In-Wonder). :/

More help would be appreciated (you guys have helped me a great deal so far).

tearinox · 11-26-2003, 09:27 AM

type startx
if it still doesn't work, you need to edit /etc/X11/XFree86
or you need to install X and a window manager such as KDE or gnome.

Do you remember telling it to install one of those?

MentatMM · 11-26-2003, 10:05 AM

When I type startx, I get the following errors:

Quote:

(WW) RADEON: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:1:0:1) found
(EE) No devices detected

XIO: fatal IO error 104 (connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

I don't know alot about Linux, but that error makes it sound like I can't intitialize XFree86 because of my video card.

To answer your question, I believe I installed KDE as my Window Manager (although it could have been Gnome, I just picked one at random, can't quite remember). Also, any idea why the boot loader didn't work when I updated?

kilgoretrout · 11-26-2003, 11:28 AM

A couple things. ATI has a linux driver for that card that you need to download from their website. But before you even try that let's straighten out the current problem and get a boot loader properly installed. Apparently the upgrade preserved your old lilo(the default boot loader) settings. Easiest thing now is do a fresh install but this time pick the new install option instead of upgrade. You'll come to another option screen where you'll be asked where you want it installed. Choose the install on existing partition(s) option. You already have the linux partitions created on the slave drive and the installer will automatically detect that these are the only partitions that it can install on, i.e. it won't touch your windows partitions.

A few things about partition naming in linux. In linux, partitions are named by where they are on the ide bus. If you have a standard setup, you have two ide channels(ide1 and ide2) each capable of supporting two ide devices, one configured master and the other configured slave, for a totoal of four devices. In linux, ide1,master is hda, ide1,slave is hdb, ide2,master is hdc and ide2,slave is hdd. The first primary partition on hda is hda1 which is where windows is almost always installed. You can have up to four primary partitions on a hard drive. For hda, they are sequentially numbered from hda1 through hda4. Same thing goes for hard drives on hdb, hdc or hdd. To get around the four primary partition limit, you can also create extended/logical partitions. The first extended/logical partition on hda is hda5 and successive ones are sequentially numbered.

Make doubly sure you have your hard drives jumpered with with the windows drive being master and the linux drive being slave. If your board supports cable select jumpering that should be fine. Assuming you have your windows drive master and linux drive slave, they will be hda and hdb in linux. You need to be sure that lilo is installed to the mbr on hda which is why I've gone through all this stuff.

MentatMM · 11-26-2003, 08:24 PM

The boot loader is now working correctly (options for both linux and windows). Thanks!

Now, can you folks help me to get that video card working so I can get into a GUI?

kilgoretrout · 11-28-2003, 11:57 AM

Let me go through the steps. You have to install the ati radeon driver but before you do that you must first install the kernel source; the ati driver will not install w/o it. Unfortunately, the kernel source is not included in the download version of mdk 9.2. You can download the kernel source rpm here:

ftp://ftp.cs.uu.nl/mirror/Linux/Mand.../Mandrake/RPMS

The package you need is:

kernel-source-2.4.22-10mdk.i586.rpm

You can download this from windows and save it to a directory there. Then boot into mandrake and login as root. From there, you need to navigate to the directory where you downloaded the kernel source rpm. Post back if you need instructions on how to do this from the command line. Once in the directory do the following:

# rpm -ivh kernel-source

If you get this far, post back and I'll go through the radeon driver download and install.

MentatMM · 11-30-2003, 06:32 PM

I downloaded the file that you suggested and it is in the following location.

C:\linuxstuff\kernel-source-2.4.22-10mdk.i586

I could use those instructions that you offered on how to navigate to this directory with the command line.

Thanks!

kilgoretrout · 12-01-2003, 12:16 AM

The basic navigation command in linux is "cd" for change directory. Partitions in linux are accessed through mount points. Basically, the directory structure of the partition is grafted on to the mount point directory. Mandrake puts all mount points in /mnt so run this first to see what's there:

# cd /mnt

that will put you in the /mnt directory. Another fundamental command is "ls" which lists the contents of the current directory. To see what's in /mnt run:

# ls

You'll get a printout of all subdirectories and files in /mnt. IIRC mandrake sets up the mount point for your first windows partition as "win_c" or something like that. Next do:

# cd win_c
# ls

you should see your linuxstuff directory listed if everything went well. Then do:

# cd linuxstuff
# ls

and you should see your kernel source rpm. Now your where you want to be. Run:

# rpm -ivh kernel-source

and the package should install.

MentatMM · 12-01-2003, 11:14 AM

I couldn't get cd win_c to work (cd windows/ worked), but the ls command didn't pull up anything under the directory. Since I couldn't get that to work, I simply burned the kernel-source to CD and tried to install it that way. When I install the kernel-source I get the following error message.

Preparing... ###100%
l: kernal-source ###100%
error: unpacking of archive failed on file /usr/share/doc/kernel-source-2.4.22: cpio: mkdir failed-permission denied

Any ideas as to what I could be doing wrong? Maybe I'm not logged in to root and only think that I am? I'm using the login and password that I setup during installation (thought that was root).

MentatMM · 12-03-2003, 10:06 AM

/bump

tearinox · 12-09-2003, 01:47 PM

sign in as root
type:
mkdir /mnt/win
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/win (note /dev/hda1 only works if it was installed first, if not then, you have to look at the bootup to see what devices are mounted, i know a command will show the bootup message, i think dmesg but im at school and cant try)

and it should automatically work (hopefully)