dual boot problem with hard disk =(
 

Hi everyone =)

I just installed Mandrake 9.2 (wowww, it's so cool! i like it). But here is my problem..

I have 2 PC at home. An old one (500 mhz, clean hard disk) and an new one (2ghz, win xp - fat32). I wanted to install, on the old one, Linux Mandrake, but I thought it'd be faster for me if I removed the 500 mhz's hard disk and put it on the 2ghz, and then install, which I did... The installation went succeful. I configured everything and linux was workin fine on the 2ghz.. I shutted down the computer... removed the Linux Hard disk, plugged on the 500 mhz. Now here is the prob..

On the 2ghz one, 1010101010110 start appearing at bootup, and it hanged there. =(
On the 500 mhz one, it says "OS MISSING" =(

I'm sorry if this has been asked alot of time, im just a little noob trying to discover linux hihih. Is there a way to this?

Oh and also, the 500 mhz doesnt have a CD drive (which is why I plugged the hard disk on the 2ghz one)..

I thought about, deleting everything on the Linux hard disk, take the 2ghz cd rom drive and put it on the 500 mhz. then do a fresh install... but that would just take too long hahaha.. well..

please help me =) thank you

The problem, most likely is because the two machines have different hardware (i.e. motherboard, processor, etc) and when you installed Mandrake to one machine and its configuration and then moved it to the other machine it no longer detected the hardware that it was configured to run on so it freaked. Does that make sense??

rberry88

thanks for your reply =). but I dont think that is the problem. =// I always did that to install Windows XP or Windows 2003 on the 500 mhz. I know that Windows and Linux are different, but I'm sure this is not the case =l.

Did you ensure that the jumpers were set on the hard drives as master - 2GB and slave- 500Mhz !

Just a thought!

rberry88 makes a valid point. Different hardware configs might be the reason why you can't boot on your 500mhz box. But it also could be that your bootloader is on a different hdd? You didn't specify if you installed the hdd as a slave,master, etc. when you had it in the 2ghz box. Let's assume that you did install it as a slave; if you installed the bootloader in the mbr, that's the reason it won't boot when you moved it to your other box.

If I were you, there's two things I would try:

1) I would take the cd drive from the 2ghz box and temporarily install it in the 500mhz box. Then, using the 1st installation CD, boot up and hit F1 and type rescue at the prompt. A menu will give you the choice to reload your bootloader. And hopefully if the hdd reboots, you will be able to reconfigure your hardware config. Also, you might have to edit fstab and lilo.conf.

2) On your 2ghz box, boot up with XP's install disk and type in repair install IIRC.
You most likely over-wrote your mbr when you installed 9.2.

woahh! yep I put the linux hard disk as a Slave... woah. nice idea man. imma try that, thanks alottttttt!!