ill probably catch you tommorrow,, oops it is tommorrow, lol hell its 4:30am mna i need to sleep, lol. but i dont want to i want to install linux lol.

i see what your doing with the partitions so ill give that a go. but not until i get some sleep cuz i aint too clear headed right now and these damn infomercials are annoying this early in the morning.

so let me give it a try by myself ive asked enough of you for one night. lol.

well no matter what i do or which linux mode i choose mandrake will not boot.
which is totally messed up because Mandrake Move runs just fine.

ok i installed it set it to auto partition thenincreased the swap file to 2 gigs, i have a gig of ram. one big problem was that it only detected 896 megs but i assume that is because the installer was using a ram drive so the installer didnt see all the ram ... ??? ...???

ok grub and lilo both come open and i choose linux linux enterprise or dailsafe mode and all that happens is 1 of 2 things. mostly i get just a black screen nothing there just black, and it sits for over 15 min with no hard drive activity. another thing was scrambled video it looked like a rainbow colored checkerboard. so i lowered my DDR timings. i have my 3ghz HT overclocked to 3.45 with lower ddr frequency and a 920 mhz fsb. that could be causing it but none of that explains why MandrakeMove runs fine from the cdrom.

so fellas can ya help me here ? any suggestions ?

why does lilo and grub both come open and then nothing happens when i choose the linux install to run.

im totally lost, i dont know the boot sequence of linux so i have no idea what its doing.


the only other thing i can think of is a failed netowrk initialization on boot. i see my router lights blink so i assume its trying to talk. i do NOT use dhcp i use a static ip and such with the router. which again with MandrakeMove works fine.
i may have gotten the gateway wrong ill try again to repair the install and change the network setup.

heeeeelllllp lol

the standard linux kernel only sees 900 or so megs of ram. you need
a kernel option for 1 to 4 gigs of ram. i have a gig, and leave it as 900
cause the 1 gig option slows down my machine a little.

lilo and grub are versatile, but different.

for simplicity's sake, you could just make one big partition as /
and make a swap file later. that would make figuring out your boot
problems much faster.

your kidding me ? only 900

ok another case in point of the "advancements" of linux being backtracked with a cripling feature like 900 megs of maximum ram, i mean come on mandrake only work with 900 megs ? sheesh.
sorry for the attitude i just find that hard to believe that even now ,, what nearly a decade later they still cant make a standard linux with more than 900 megs of ram.

i HAD it set to 896 like linux said it recognised and it made no differnece from what i recall,, the install repair was quick so ill try it again and make SURE i have it at what linux sees.

also when loading the boot loader where should i have installed to the whole drive, ie hdc or the root of the drive hdca ? or another partition.

finally got it to boot but i deleted the entire drive and let it auto install stuff and partition the drive, the onyl thing in the bios i changed was i had APIC ACPI IRQ set to OFF an i turned it on. but as always theres always something else.
ive had this drive a while and its bad, meaning it makes that scraping grinding noise ,, its an IBM drive so anyone who has dealt with the IBM or quantum drives knows that these drives are infamous for doing this,, there are shot plain and simple,. the drive head isnt initialising and it makes a scraping noise. and isnt recognised, the only thing is sometimes it works sometiimes it dont.
ok so it started to boot hit the loading section and started scraping. ibm wont replace it since its an OEM drive but im gunna clal them and bitch like mad until they do replace it. and they will they always do.

so atleast i know it boots now.

thank god for pricewatch.com i gotta order another drive. a maxtor 40gig 7200 U133 drive for my U133 controller will do nicely. 43 bucks and free shipping.

it's just a different kernel, for 1-4 gigs of ram. mandrake probably comes
with it. just upgrade it. no big deal.

maybe i didn't explain well. i meant it wouldn't use more than around
900 megs unless you use the bigmem kernel option. so if you have
a gig and a half, the small mem kernel will work, but it will only use
900 megs. some distributions come with a 1-4 gig kernel by default.
some don't. then there is the 4-64 gig of ram kernel.

x
Linux can use up to 64 Gigabytes of physical memory on x86 systems.
However, the address space of 32-bit x86 processors is only 4
Gigabytes large. That means that, if you have a large amount of
physical memory, not all of it can be "permanently mapped" by the
kernel. The physical memory that's not permanently mapped is called
"high memory".
If you are compiling a kernel which will never run on a machine with
more than 960 megabytes of total physical RAM, answer "off" here (default
choice and suitable for most users). This will result in a "3GB/1GB"
split: 3GB are mapped so that each process sees a 3GB virtual memory
space and the remaining part of the 4GB virtual memory space is used
by the kernel to permanently map as much physical memory as
possible.

If the machine has between 1 and 4 Gigabytes physical RAM, then answer "4GB" here.
If more than 4 Gigabytes is used then answer "64GB" here. This
selection turns Intel PAE (Physical Address Extension) mode on.
PAE implements 3-level paging on IA32 processors. PAE is fully
supported by Linux, PAE mode is implemented on all recent Intel
processors (Pentium Pro and better). NOTE: If you say "64GB" here,
then the kernel will not boot on CPUs that don't support PAE!

ok so far so good with mandrake running i tooled around with the /home partition size and got it down to about 10 gigs so that the drive dont start crunching and crash,, if you know about these ibm drives you understand what i did.. ok so on with the show.

i havent tried linux since redhat8 and i must say the improvements are instantly obvious. and im liking it already. from the automount auto run of cd's ro the auto mount of a hard drive when you reboot with a new one plugged in. to simplified networking and network sharing. all of that are things that are making me WANT to know more and more about the little penguin.

but i still have issues im hoping you will be patient enough with me to answer.

1st why are things taking so long to open after i click on them, like konquerer it takes at least 10 sec's to open., the task bar shows its there but it takes a while to open. same thing with cd's and certain parts of the hard drive.

2 -
why after mounting my extra storage drive which is a fat32 drive can i NOT read the files on it. there are some tutorials i put there id like to get to. linux sees the drive and i mounted it as /storage and i see the storage folder but its empty.

3-
why cant i install games as a user, root can do it, since its the sys admin. basically i want to make ME the ONLY user of this machine an admin. i logged in as admin and went to the user properties and tried to make my regular user have all access bt i know i wasnt doing it right. is there an easy to do option for "make admin"

3a
after installing quake and soldier of fortune why are those games not listed in the applications menu nor an icon on the desktop ?

4
does root have issues with networking ? i could barely get the networking running as root, and getting on the net took forever. anyone know why ?

i have more but i cant remember them. lol but ill leave it at that for now.

oh crap i forgot one of the biggest ones i wanted to know how to do.
i have XP on my SATA raid drives and part of that is a huge storage center.

how can i make lilo boot up and show the XP install and the linux install BOTH as a boot option so i dont have to go into the bios and change the boot device priority to the linux drive every time i want to boot linux ?
or would it be just a helluva lot easier to install XP then linux on the same drive ?

im pretty surprised mandrake dont see the SATA RAID drives that was a big disappointment.

1. Konquerer (im assuming your using kde) is EXTREMELY slow and buggy in my experience. If you want to try somethin faster, get fluxbox.

2. Usually when you mount windows, you have to access it being root. Go into a terminal (konsole for example) and type "su" to log in as root. And then go into your mounted windows drive and tell us if you see anything.

3. DONT BE LOGGED ON AS ADMIN ON A REGULAR BASIS. It is a security thing and you dont want to do it. What you do is log in the command line and type "su" to log in as root temperarily. Then you can install the program and go back as a user and be happy.

3a. Right click the K or start thing and select K edit, its self explanetory.

4. dunno, dont have that problem

5. In slackware, we type liloconfig in terminal. In mandrake, I think you go to your Mandrake Control Center to edit all that stuff. Somewhere in there is liloconfig.

thanks man much appreciated ill give it a try once i get mandrake reloaded since i bombed the damn thing.

i went into root, then configure users,, went to my regular user account and added myself to all the groups,, which didnt look like groups they looked like hard drive directories.
anyways i also ran mandrake update.
so it was one of those thing but i have a feeling it was mandrake update,, redhat did that to me in a similar way the last time i ran redhat and updated ,, i updated then i couldnt run it anymore..
i updated the things i wanted and bug fixes and security fixes and restarted and thats all she wrote... no more linux,.,, actually i could log into both root and my username,, but thats all there was not even a clock just desktop and taskbar and start button,, once i clicked the start button all i had was lock desktop and log off.. no more program menu or anything.

alright. Well if you have any other questions, just e-mail me (click button under my posts, ill be VERY happy to answer) or post on the forum.

ok ive officially fucking had it sorry for the language but this is total bullshit.

i have only successfully installed and booted and ran linux 1 friggin time. that time being the ONE AND ONLY time lilo loaded itself to HDA (MBR) no other time has this option came up every other time my only options are HDA HDA1 HDA2 and so on,, i have reinstalled mandrake over 12 times now cuz everytime i load it it says its successful but when lilo opens and i choose EVERY version of linux that lilo shows all it does is either 1) say its looking at the bios then its says decompressing kernel....loading kernel and thats it it just sits there and does nothing!!@!@!@%$@^#*
a
im so god damn mad right now you cant imagine.

wtf is the deal with this stupid installer not installing linux and lilo or grub properly.
i dont get anyt errors or anything,, it just says booting kernnel and thats all,, or i just get a black screen after selecting linux from the lilo menu.

the only time i got an error was when i choose failsafe and then it says something like BDSA too big : overlaps lilo second stage or something like that. what the heck is that.
i dont even get a bash promt or anything,., it just sits and looks at me pissing me off.

sorry for the anger but i know you know how i feel linux isnt a smooth os by any means and... well i know you know what im going thru.

ive tried everything from auto partition to manual..
auto partition being
/
swap
/home
i have manually done this too but nothing..
i have also done it manually like this
/
swap
/var
/user
/home
and still nothing.


why does it only load if lilo is loaded to the MBR and how can i make lilo load into the MBR ? why did it only work 1 time.

I'm really not sure whats happening. You might want to read this http://blacksun.box.sk/tutorials.php/id/47 Maybe you missed something? Because i've never had this kind of problem before.

Linux is DEFINETLY not a smooth OS at first. I was pretty pissed when i couldn't even install 1 friggin program, but its well worth it. Trust me

ps. Try completely wiping out your hard drive and starting from scratch. Use the mandrake partitioning tool and delete everything. Then exit out and let it partition it that way. Then start over and see if better luck comes.

found another link you may want to read http://www.iceteks.com/articles.php?...cle=linux&p=3&

Lays out the install of mandrake for you. See what you can dig up

It COULD be the buggy hard drive YOU mentioned having TWICE.

It might also be the plain fact that to fix the menu thing all you needed to do was ask. Not reload.

I just can't beleive it. People come here and complain about linux not working right for them. And in the end it comes down to two things. Everytime. Not following directions or trying this out on a crappy computer.