Hi. I've been a Windows user until just recently and am thus a Linux newbie. The computer I'll be referring to hereafter is an Acer TravelMate 230 laptop with a Celeron processor and 256 MB of memory. About a month ago, I downloaded and burned a CD of Mandriva One. I have enjoyed it thus far, but I made a little mistake last night; I accidentally deleted a vital Windows partition (logical drive D:\) with DiskDrake, and I wasn't quite sure what to do. So I used my Windows XP CD to delete all partitions and format the entire disk, whereupon I reinstalled Windows using an image I've got lying around.

Well, today, I attempted to re-install Mandriva. After defragging Windows, I booted from the CD, ran the live install, and went through all the procedures. On the C:\ logical drive in Windows, I have 22 GB, and I split that roughly half-and-half with Mandriva. The OS crashed once at the end of the installation procedure (which I found completely normal, since it crashed twice the first time I installed it but has been stable ever since), but it worked like a charm when I booted up again.

Now, I'm going to try to give a step-by-step process of what I did from there on. The first thing I did was set up my wireless card. I had to use this "ndiswrapper" thing with a Windows driver, since apparently Linksys doesn't make drivers for Linux, but that part nevertheless went smoothly. Then I installed Firefox 1.5.0.4 and uninstalled the RPM packages of Fx 1.0.6 that came with the distribution. I had to leave at that point, however, so I turned the computer off.

Later tonight, when I booted it up again, Mandriva worked just fine at first. I added the wireless network applet to the taskbar and hid the "wlan0" system tray entry (since it always says it's a low signal, even when I'm next to the router - because it's a Windows driver, I surmise). Since I like the default KDE menu better than the one Mandriva comes with, I opened the Menu Editor and changed it to the corresponding setting. I closed the Menu Editor window when the "updating" message disappeared, but there appeared to be no change.

I ended the session and logged in again... and all of the programs were gone. Even all of the icons on the Linux equivalent of the Quick Launch bar had disappeared. The "Run Command," "Search," "Log Off," etc. options were all on the K Menu, but no programs were listed. I right-clicked on the taskbar and selected "Configure Panel" (to see if that worked), but the window that came up was completely blank save for the "Help," "Cancel," et al. buttons on the bottom. Then I double-clicked on the "Home" desktop icon, and it asked me with what program I wanted to open it. It came up just fine after I located the Konqueror executable, so I tried ending the session as before and trying again. I logged in with no trouble, but the "KDE is loading" thing was unusually fast. The exact same state awaited me, so I rebooted my system.

No sooner had I booted up than the OS crashed. As a thought suddenly hit me, I booted up again and attempted to log out and back in as root to see if root's programs on the menu were still intact. But it crashed again instead of ending the session. I tried twice more, but it did the same thing. Something... is definitely not right. Windows seems to be working just fine, so I don't think this can be attributed to a faulty hard drive sector or something.

So, now that you've endured that, here are my questions. First, does anyone know what could have caused this? Second, can it be fixed, and if so, how? Third, if I have to reinstall Mandriva, how would I go about doing it (i.e. is there a way to get rid of it using DiskDrake? Would it be easier to try to install it from the CD again? Can that even be done, and how might I do it?)? Finally, if worse comes to worst, is there a way to "give" Mandriva's HD partition back to Windows without having to do the same thing I did last night?

If you haven't noticed already, I'm a complete novice to Linux. Any help would be muchly appreciated!

Oh, also, I forgot to mention that attempting to open the Menu Editor now does absolutely nothing. A minor detail, but it might be important.

...Also, the version of Windows I've got is XP. I wasn't very clear on that...

Welcome to Mandrake. Every version since 9.2 has gotten progressively worse. 9.2 was actually fairly good. I would try that out if you feel you must use mandrake.

As your user(not root), try running

rm -rf ~/.kde* (inside a terminal, while KDE is not running, you can do this by pressing control+alt+f2 and then logging in before logging into KDM(the graphical boot manager program) to flush out your settings, and then attempt to log in regularly.


If this doesn't work(I suspect that it won't by the way :-( ), you can simply reboot with the mandrake CD inside the PC and just delete and recreate the linux partitions and install into those. (just boot off of the CD and install mandrake exactly the same way you did before)

If I were you I would just try to reinstall the OS the same way you did before.

If it (the install)crashes at any time, ask questions. The install was probably not complete or is corrupted in some way.

Then I would use urpmi to update the system files, then I might change some appearance settings.

Try that first,

You do not need to worry about that. Reinstall one from the cd, it will
overwrite the existing mandrake

You could use a live cd to format the mandy partition as fat32.
I have not told you that. You can persever with mandy

Because you have a laptop, I suspect you may as well try to install
mandy 2005 or 2006 LE rather than Mandy one (if one keeps being funny).
I have no rational for that, apart from one "seems" to be funny sometimes.
When installing 2005 or 2006 do say acpi=off noapic nolapic
at the kernel boot, it may help to install (you may not have suspend function
initially) and wireless may be a little harder to configure than with one.

If you are new to linux look at the pdf/html in the madnriva doc
(on the distro or webiste) or look in LQ bookmarks for newbie and also for rute

Thanks very much to all of you! I overwrote the current Mandriva partitions using the CD. It seems to be working just fine now, and there haven't been any crashes or anything. Hopefully, it'll stay like this... Thanks again!