Hello!
Yesterday my mandrake 9.2 computer pooped out on me. It spontaneously rebooted and never reached as far as the first screen when it (the bios?) identifies the graphics card, etc., just hanging with the hdd light on. I tried to put in the installation disk but although the disk was accessed, the installation menu never appeared on screen. I figured that something must have gone wrong with the motherboard.

Today, I tried with the installation disk again and this time the installation script started running like it was supposed to. I removed the installation disk, rebooted again, and chose the "failsafe" version to boot into. Everything seemed to be ok so I went into the other room for a minutte or two. When I came back, all I could see was this:


Oops: 0002
ehci-hcd usb-uhci usbcore rtc
<snip>
Call Trace:
Code: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
<4>usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 30, frame# 767
usb-uhci.c: Host controller halted, trying to restart.
usb-uhci.c: interrupt, starus 31, frame# 997
usb-uhci.c: Host controller halted, trying to restart.
usb-uhci.c: interrupt, starus 31, frame# 876
usb-uhci.c: Host controller halted, trying to restart.
Kernel panic: Attempted to kill the idle task!
In idle task - not syncing
_

(Juding from this I figure it is something to do with the memory stick that I have been cavalierly removing without unmounting)

So anyway, my main question is this:
is there a way to reinstall the OS with reformatting the hard drive and erasing all the info I have? I know that a windows reinstallation will do this but I have never found out a way to do it in linux (or at least the mandrake or suse versions of linux).

thanks in advance,
doug

depends where the information is, and how the drive is split... if you have a dedicated /home partition and everything you want is in /home like it should be, then just reinstall and tell it not to format that partition. everythign will be just as you left it....

Yes, all the info is stored on one disk that is already formatted corrrectly. The problem that I encountered previously was that the installation script (mandrake 92, remember) didn't give me the option (IIRC) . Perhaps there is an 'advanced' installation option where the scripters assumed we know a least a little about how partitions, etc. work.

If not, can anyone recommend a distro that will definitely allow me the option to keep existing formats?

doug

if it's a seperate disk.. whip it out and put it on a shelf... just try and let the insatller do somethign to it there... but when i used to use mandrake, back in 8.1 days, the expert installer was capable of doing that.

Followup:
I was wrong-- I was able to reinstall without reformatting by choosing the 'upgrade' installation option. The graphical walkthrough hovered for a disconcerting amount of time at the "format partitions" step, but no harm done. Thanks for your help! I will keep the harddrive-removal option for the future, since it seems like a good trick that could help in a lot of cases (too bad that I am allergic to dust!)

regards,
doug