i am trying to get my mandrake 10 install to boot. i have mdk10 installed on a 6 gig partition at the end of a 60 gig hdd with the first 50 gigs for windows xp on my laptop(its a dell 5150), and i have lilo im my mbr. everything goes great but after the now booting screen with the status bar finishes nothing happens. i get that mandrake blue color screen but with nothing on it. this is on my laptop that i use everyday for school and i am only putting linux on it to mess around with and learn a little, i dont want to damage any of my windows stuff. i have partition magic, can i use that to move my entire linux partition in front of the windows partition without damaging it? i have read that linux cant boot when its that far down on a drive. i also read that i can just put the \boot drive before the windows partition. what should I do, preferably the easiest and safest way. thanks alot.

After the initial boot screen where you select Linux or Windows, after you select Linux you see the moving status bar.

Hit ESC when it appears and you will be shown each service as it loads.

Try to find the point at which the system hangs or freezes.

Also try selecting the SAFE or non-FB mode startup.

This will leave you at a text based login.

Enter the root login and password here if you get this far.

At the prompt hit

"X" return

and see if you get a graphical screen with a movable mouse.

If you do, hit backspace to get back to the console.

If you find that they system freezes, you probably have a problem with your motherboard vis a vis one of the kernel modules.

In this case you may need to specify kernel parameters one or more at a time until you find the one that causes the system NOT to freeze.

e.g.

nolapic
noapm
noacpi
noagp
nopcmcia
nousb

BTW: It sounds like you have things properly partitioned -IF- you start seeing the services load up after you hit [ESC] to get to the text startup screen.

i booted the non-fb and checked the root drive for errors and then it loaded up like normal only the video was messed up. i tried to boot normal and i got just as far as usual, only this time I had my headphones on and i heard what i assume is the startup sound. i think i just have a bad image on my cd. im going to try downloading the 10.0 official and see if that works any better than the 10.0 community. it seems like its booting right, It just wont show any graphix (the kernel?) like explorer.exe does in windows, or give me a mouse cursor. how do i specify kernel paramaters? i think it might be my pcmcia card(internal dell wireless card), i got a wierd message when it tried to load but it kept going and i didnt get to read it.

Linux is very unlike Windows.

In Windows the graphic display is tied closely to the XP OS.

Linux on the other hand treats the graphic display like any other program.

The graphic display for the most part has nothing to do directly with the kernel. It's just another program which Linux can run.

You can specify those kernel parameters, by hitting TAB at the initial graphical boot screen which gives you the choices between Linux and Winblows.

This will put you to a text prompt showing you which kernel entries are available.

To specify the parameters type in one of the entries followed by the parameters.

e.g.

[TAB]
vmlinux linux-nonfb linux

: linux-nonfb noapm noacpci nolapic

And the kernel loads up.

when i did a bon-fb boot it said- bringing up interface eth0 [failed], could that be the problem? hitting tab at the lilo screen didnt do anything. nothing seems to be freezing, i just cant git the interface to run, should i try gnome instead of kde maybe?

The message you are seeing normally indicates that either Linux is loading the wrong driver for your ethernet interface, it has selected a driver which while close does not support your interface, or another module is missing which will enable your interface.

You can specify the kernel load parameters by editing /etc/lilo.conf by hand as well then typing lilo at the prompt.

You also might want to check the LinuxLaptop web pages to see if anyone has run into trouble or has fixes for your specific Laptop.