I recently purchased both Red Hat 7.2 and Mandrake 8.1 (The Download CD's from Linux Emporium) After having changed my graphics card to an ATI Radeon 64 MB and installing a second 3.2 GB Hard disk. My previous release of Mandrake 7.1 would no longer work / install. I want a dual boot system.

I tried to install Red hat first using my second Hard disk for my / and /home, Grub was put on my 'C' drive.

All went well everything loaded and ran that was until I closed my system down and tried to reload. Subsequent I-node errors files lost, file systems not mounted etc meant I had to scrap that lot and tried again using the free spce on my 8gb C drive.

This time everything got about half way through installing the packages when everything just hung ...

so I reportitioned my drives got rid of everything to do with linux ensured all the drive was defragged checked etc then tried this time with the Mandrake distro.

After actually 2 attempts It did install all the packages went on etc
So I tried to log on as myself and later Root, guess what System Hangs again no response to any of the usual suspect keystrokes
so a switch off seemed the only answer - tried a reboot Lost and incorrect i-nodes recovered but still unable to log on.

Can anyone suggest how I might be able to resolve this problem.

Partition magic reported a problem when I rebooted into *dows
PM corrected the partition table - rebooted OK

I suspect that 1: My C drive which is around 8gb has a bit of spare room which *dows / Dos doesn't use because of the way FDISK works Cluster sizes etc and Red Hat / Mandrake try to use this bit of space and somehow this then corrupts the partition table and prevents use --- Or then that may be a complete red cod :-) - Both C and D drives detect as LBA?

Puzzled / Baffled / Cross :smash:

I have experience with both distros. They CAN co-exist together on the same computer.

No cable select on IDE.

No switching boot order in BIOS for more than one distro.

No auto-partitioning.

No swap if RAM is over 127MB.

PM will report errors if you auto-partition or repartition in Linux. Let PM do the job. Make up your mind. 2.5GB apiece works for me.

You haven't mentioned which Windows. 2K & XP doesn't work with lilo/grub.

You need only one boot loader. Grub would be a better choice. Write the Mandy lilo to its own partition.

Yes forgot windows 98 se and I did use Grub and I did let both distros try an Auto Partition.

I think I'll try using PM to set up Partitions Failing that get myself a new bigger single HDD which I was thinking of getting anyway.

Oh and 256 MB Ram should this make any difference?

Still do not understand why this problem occurred tho!!!!