I am a newbie and normally I run windows XP home on a HP with a single 250 gb drive.

I downloaded and decided to install Mandriva Spring 2007 powerpack.
I wanted it as a dual boot until I was satisfied that linux would handle all of my needs.


I defraged my Drive C: multiple times in an attempt to get it as compact as possible, then ran dos, chkdsk /f/r to verify the hard disk was well.

I burned the DVD ISO and began the install.

Initially I misunderstood the partitioning and thought I was giving 75 gigs to the Linux partition but in fact I only gave it 7.5 gigs.

when it came time to install the packages it refused almost all packages saying repeatedly that I lacked the needed space.

eventually I completed the install and it rebooted the system and all seemed well. Except it wasn't. First it told me during the install that my network card was found and installed and up (linksys EG1032v3). But I could not complete the upgrade step in the install and after the install completed I could not connect to any websites, and could not ping my router. (I accepted the default dhcp settings). Then I discovered I could not print anything either. My printer was not listed in any of the dropdown menu lists. Canon I550 was not in the list and it offered me many choices for other printer drivers but I had no clue what to try experimentally.

At this point, I could not reach the internet, or any other network resource, I could not print and almost all the packages had refused to install due to the partition size problems. So the basic system seemed to work but poor decisions on my part made it pretty much worthless. So I decided to abort this install and do a complete reinstall. I would return to windows and do some basic research on the network card and the printer and possible drivers and on the next install I would fix the partition problem.

2nd install
I inserted the dvd and rebooted and chose a first time install option.
all seemed well, I got to the partition chooseing part and was still quite confused but I managed to create larger partitions by first deleting all the previous partitions and then allowing mandriva to make its own partitions, that resulted in a 7.9 gig / root and a swap partition and a /usr partition of approx 65 gigs. I proceeded on and got to the nic section and again it said all was well and the nic was installed and up. Then it said installing packages, and error appeared saying could not install filesystem. After multiple retrys I gave up on the filesystem and selected packages, again the filesystem error and again multiple retrys failed. skipped it again. finally it just failed.

3rd install
It gets worse with each try

4th install
Even worse

5th install
total disaster

abandon all attempts to install linux

Recovery plan
boot to windows XP Home
use partition magic to reassign partition back to windows
use recovery console to recover the mbr and remove all traces of grub
use chkdsk to recover any damaged sectors
If and when all seems normal again in windows XP home
Reattempt a first time install of Mandriva Linux

Any advice you can offer will be appreciated.

Maybe you should just let it do a default install and then add your packages after the system is up and running. A less painful way to see if GNU/Linux can service your needs is to use one of the 'Live' cd/dvd versions, perhaps Mandriva One or PCLinuxOS (which is a fork of Mandriva) and see how you get on.

Sounds like a solid plan, the only other thing I might add to it is some reading before the install. Here are a couple of guides to help you out.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mandr...de-37819.shtml

Be careful with the partitioning on that one, it's written with a clean hard disk in mind.

http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/i...mdv2007.1.html

http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view/KB/InstallIndex

You should find about everything you need there for a successful install and configuration. We'll all be here if you need any further help.
Good luck.

Thanks for the reply.
The links to URPMI seem like they should be quite useful.
However I do have a bit of confusion reguaring these links
When do I use them?
before the install?
instead of the install DVD?
during the install when I get to the additional sources screen?
after the install?

Thanks again for the reply

Thanks for your reply PeaceDog
I have read the links you posted and have been examining other questions reguarding install of linux and mostly they have not revealed anything new. What would be new is how to verify things are ok or not
example commands I could run to see what driver is being used on the network card. Or, commands I could run to install a printer driver for my printer, What is the idea number and type of partitions and what sizes I would set them too.

In the case of the network card, I did some investigation and discovered that while its a Linksys EG1032v3 in fact it uses a Realtek chipset and the number of the chipset. And I examined the cd that came with the network card and it has a linux driver on it thats not compiled yet, so I will need to learn how to discover if I have the required tools to do the compiling then if I do compile the driver and install it, if I don't have the tools, learn what package the tools are in and install it.

The same is true of the printer, but research on the printer question revealed that there are alternative drivers in mandriva that will work on this printer, although not perfectly and there is a web site in japan that has linux drivers for this printer. so I can download them from the Japanese site and compile and install them at a later date. Meanwhile I can use the existing printer drivers.

Anyway thanks for taking the effort to help me.

Doing a full defrag is a waste of time. I suggest do a space defrag because it is faster.

I suggest using Partition Magic to make the primary partition smaller. Then leave the space unused. If Partition Magic is too expensive, use gparted. Before using either of these programs, backup your data. Norton Ghost or Partimage from System Rescue CD makes backing up data easier than figuring out what files to backup.

Canon printers are rarely supported in Linux. Lucky for you it supports i550. Go to http://openprinting.org/show_printer...num=Canon-i550. I recommend setting up printers through CUPS web based panel. Go to http://localhost:631 to access it.

Rarely you need to compile modules (drivers). The kernel supports majority of the hardware. You just need to use the latest kernel version and find the compatible module. Load up xterm, rxvt, konsole, or anything and type /sbin/lspci. Post its output. I or someone else can give you the names of the modules.

On a single hard drive setup, storing Windows and Linux together does eat up a lot space. I suggest a simple partition scheme for Linux such as a partition for / and a partition for swap. Place swap as close to the front of the partition table or before the partition for / for better performance. Use EXT3 as the filesystem for the / partition. In the future, you can then play around with different filesystems and different format options. I recommend stay away from ReiserFS. You can use either GRUB (I think Mandriva still defaults to LILO) or Windows bootloader.

The reason why use multiple partitions is controversial. Putting different directories on separate partitions can minimize problems such as file growing to an elephant size. Also a partition can be added to a software RAID array or to a volume management like LVM2 or EVMS. I use the following partition scheme.

/boot (about 16 MB to 128 MB) (EXT3)
/ (about +8 GB) (XFS)
/var/log (about 512 MB) (EXT3)
/home (the rest) (XFS)

multiple swap partitions for easy expansion divided in 256 MB partitions

Mandriva is going down the tubes. I suggest Ubuntu.

Mandriva now uses Grub by default.

@Electro, I was just wondering, What tube is Mandriva going down??

Recovery plan
boot to windows XP Home
use partition magic to reassign partition back to windows
use recovery console to recover the mbr and remove all traces of grub
use chkdsk to recover any damaged sectors
If and when all seems normal again in windows XP home
Reattempt a first time install of Mandriva Linux

Well ran into a few glitches with the recovery plan, after I rebooted to windows xp I started up partition magic
and started to delete the linux partitions, all went fine till I got to the root partition, I got an error 29 saying
partition magic couldn't lock a locked disk. Ok! so I exited PM and rebooted, and now it boots to a black screen saying
Grub error 22, OOPs! ah ha, grub is in the mbr and is tring to jump to the first boot sector of the root partition to complete the boot
but it can't because there is no first sector. So I had to reinsert the windows XP install disk and got to the recovery step and then
jump into the recovery console and type "fixmbr" to restore and remove the grub entry then I could exit and reboot and finish the
deleting of the linux partitions and then run expand the windows partition (one of the reasons for using partition magic is it has
an option when deleting a partion to do a secure erase of all the data in the partition) else I could have just used diskpart in the
recovery console to delete the partitions
once the recovery console had restored the mbr, and partition magic had deleted the partitions and expanded the windows partition
I could goto the chkdsk and run chkdsk on the entire hard disk.
and Recovery was complete.

Thanks for the reply Electro

while I know how to defrag all I know of is a full defrag
never heard of a space defrag or how to do it.

Backup is not a problem, I have a NAS storage subsystem with full backup to 1tb raid 5 array

I am less worried about the printer, its non critical at this point, but your pointer will be helpful
since I posted I discovered the names of several drivers that I know are in the cups que that will work
although not perfectly.

yes, thats the sort of command I was looking for /sbin/lspci to find out what modules I had.
I know that no one actually expects a newbie to compile modules to make hardware actually run but
I want to know if I can do it if I must and if I have the proper packages installed to do the compiling
and how to tell if I do or don't have the sources needed to do the compiling.

Mandriva defaults to grub

Your personal partition scheme is an eye opener, I did not
realize you could mix file systems, etx3 and xfs
and that brings up the point that my NAS is xfs so that would make that useful
once I get the network card problem solved.

Thanks

Grub is a user space boot loader. This means it stores a part of itself in the MBR, but it requires additional files to access the desire filesystems. If you remove where grub files were stored, grub will come to an error upon boot up.

Before compiling programs or modules (drivers), you need to make sure the compiler is installed and a copy of the header files that is needed during compiling. Each distribution has different names for their header files. It might be named as devel, source, or header. Compiling modules first starts reading the documentation to find out if there is any extra steps. Usually, it is "make && make install". The && tells bash to do the first command and go to the next, but only if the first command does not come to an error. I recommend do not include ; like some documentation includes for compiling. The ; runs the first command and continues even after an error occurs. The ; is for scripting at the bash prompt, but not for compiling.

/sbin/lspci lists the PCI/PCI-X/PCIe/AGP devices in your computer.

Use /sbin/lsmod to list the loaded modules (drivers).

It has loose screws. Getting it to setup to compile programs or modules (drivers) takes some work than in the past. Mandrake 9.0 is easier to setup to compile programs.

Thanks Electro

Well the recovery process is complete and sucessful, I recovered the mbr and removed all the linux partitions and gave all the space
back to windows and did a chkdsk and then since I had tried mandriva one and it was not able to detect my network card either, I decided
to disable the network card, and reenable the onboard network card, its old and only does 10/100 but thats good enough. I set it up with
a static address in windows and its running fine now.

Then I did a new install of mandriva and this time I must have done most of it right because it fully installed and mostly works.
I got the printer working but not the network when I reboot to linux the network link light goes out on the router and on the card
but when I reboot to windows the light comes back on and it works.

In linux I can ping my static ip address 192.168.0.2 but not the gateway 192.168.0.1 or any other address
reboot to windows and the link lights come back on and it works fine.
I suspected that the link is not up so I tried to bring it up with /sbin/ifconfig
this tells me I have the realteck 8139 network card at eth0 and it is assigned my static ip address
but when I tried to do '/sbin/ifconfig/eth0 up' it failed with "you don't have permission to do this"
so I tried sudo, but appearently my user id has no sudo privleges, so I tried to log in as root with the root password
but mandriva won't permit root login. I assume at as user, I can't gain permission to change the sudo users file and I don't
know how to get to root, despite having the root password.

lspcidrake -v |fgrep NETWORK_ETHERNET shows me that I have two network interface cards
the RealTek8139 and the linksys gigabit.

/sbin/lsmod shows me that I have two modules loaded for the network card
8139too
nii and the nii is forwarded to 8139too

anyway I consider that the issue of the recovery is resolved with much thanks to those that helped
and I will take the rest of this to the mandriva forum

Thanks

network card is up and running, the final solution was in windows
seems that windows shuts down the card when you shut down windows and
linux doesn't know how to reenable it. So goto the control panel and then to system then to hardware and then select the network card and its properties, find the wake on lan and enable wake on lan. This prevents
windows from shutting down the network card and when you reboot to linux
all is well and works

Consider all major issues resolved

Thanks

The command is su not sudo.

There are other ways if you do not know su (substitute user). Hit CTL+ALT+F1...F6 will provide you different tty or terminal. CTL+ALT+F7 is usually for GUI. Other distributions uses CTL+ALT+F5 for GUI.

If BIOS does not an option assign IRQ to devices, your way could be a work around. Usually Windows systems are set, so the IRQ are assigned by the OS. If it is changed to BIOS, Linux will not have any problems of using the device.

The utility sudo is a safer way to run commands as root. Usually users or a group have to be added to the wheel group in order for sudo to provide root privileges to desire users.

No more difficult than adding the -devel package(s), gcc, c++, make etc. The fact that you found things more difficult after 9.0 is unfortunate. There's such an abundance of Linux distro's to choose from, one's bound to fit.

Out of curiosity, why is doing the above safer?