Karl,

Maybe even backing up your MBR may not be enough if the issue is with MDK 10 screwing up the partition table when creating it's partition.

It seems to me that MDK 10 is just not ready for prime time. I don't mind a few bugs like MDK 9.2's disappearing menus, but losing ability to boot into a Windows system is MAJOR, IMO.

I have installed MDK 9.2 on my office computer. It sits alone on the Slave drive with Windows XP and 2K on the Master. I boot with Lilo and have no problem bringing up any of the three o/s's. Since the Linux kernel is too big, I was unable to create a boot floppy, so I made a boot CD instead and it works fine (emergency only).

So far, I am enjoying 9.2. It installed beautifully, recognized all peripherals. network connections etc. with no problem.

I think I'll wait a few months for the MDK 10.x RC, then give it a whirl.

As far as distro goes. I am not that astute a Linux user to be able to recommend one or the other, but from what I have read, MDK is as good as the others and perhaps easier to use than most.

well here i am posting from mandrake 10, with an entact dual boot setup.

this is what i did...(caution, i became a victim of my own stupidity)

1. booted to xp cd
2. created two partitions
3. formated ntfs on the windows and left the second alone
4. made sure windows was all setup
5. booted to mandrake 10 cd 1
6. created partitions, freaked out and rebooted to make sure windows still worked
7. booted back into mandrake and created the partitions again
8. finished with all that and rebooted, into windows first to make sure it still works
9. blew up kde somehow...kept giveing me errors about something or other
10. ran the install all over again even deleting and recreating the partitions
11. ran linneighborhood and set up my smb mounts (root what???)

even managed to get xmms to play music over the network....maybe this is isn't so bad after all....

OK, I'm confused. Can someone summarise for me.

I have a MdK 9.2 / XP dual boot going.

Basically my question is this; Will I have problems installing MdK 10 Community, and will I be able to boot to both Windows and Linux?? I currently use Lilo. Seems to me that it's more headache than what it's worth. I can't afford to format any of my drives.

from what i gather, you shouldn't as long as you use the same partitions when you install 10....

IMHO, leave your existing installation alone. If it works well, as my similar setup does, no sense in tempting the devil.

MDK will probably be an excellent choice-in a few months, but for now, the partition issue is dangerous and I, for one, will stay away from MDK 10 until this bug is well understood and resolved in some future release of MDK 10.x.

theres a post on my LUG that says if you go into BIOS and change disk access to LBA that XP boots ok

I would use the same partitions. I'd just install Mdk 10 over 9.2. Everything else would stay the same.

Yeah it does, bot only after you apply the patch provided on this (Micro$oft) site:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q263044

If you can't unzip the EXE to get to that one file, just copy the one you've already installed to your boot disk.

I was another one that got nailed by the 10.0 release. I spent the last 5 days searching the Internet, downloading every mbr related application I could find, installing the XP Recovery Console (via the 6 floppy disks) at least a few dozen times, did bootcfg/chkdisk/fixboot/fixmbr/etc an uncountable number of times, re-installed HAL.DLL/NTLDR/NTDETCT.COM/Boot.ini, etc. Nothing worked.

Luckily, I found this thread this morning. Changing the Bios to LBA was what finally solved it for me as well (I never had to do the bs=1000 count=1000 trick). I could not find where to change the LBA at first. On my T2080 Emachine with the L7VMM motherboard you just hit the delete key as soon as you see the Emachines logo to get to the Bios Setup program. Under "Standard CMOS Setup", you go into the Primary IDE Master submenu. Under the Access Mode tab you can then make the change from Auto to LBA.

Once I rebooted I was able to get to Windows via LILO. Windows did another CHKDSK automatically when it got the Windows XP screen. It then rebooted and let me into XP . This time Windows XP went through and refound all the hardware. It also did not associate any of my past settings. However, after I rebooted again all my Windows settings had magically reappeared (even though it never did a "Restore to Last Good" as far as I could tell).

I hope that helps.

I am also a little surprised that I still do not see this as an errata on the Mandrake home page. To say that this was a serious flaw is an incredible understatement.

Julian

Hi all,
I am a serious noob so needless to say I was a little distressed when my computer wouldn't boot to WinXP (which I only plan to use for playing games) after I installed Mandrake 10. Thanks to [SA]Chem I changed my primary IDE channel to LBA and it fixed the problem. What a life saver this forum is. Thanks again and glad to be a member.
Jet Noise

i joined this forum just to thank everyone for this post. i have reinstalled xp twice and messed with mbr far too much trying to get xp to boot. changing acess to lbr worked. im a bit surprised it was not auto selected to that in bios by asus (i have a7n8x deluxe). anyways THANKS! now im off to install nforce mobo drivers and then ati srpm to get 3d working.

switching to LBA mode worked for me too. LILO now boots to both WinXP Pro and MDK10 successfully. Thankfully, I saw this thread while looking for my XP CD (I was going to reformat).

Thanks for saving me from the hassle!

just to note. i was unable to get nforce installed. . ati installed fine however (with kernel sources installed) but 3d support is not present. overall i thought 10 had too many bugs to be my work environment. i am going back to 9.2 and will probably update my kernel.

Hello all,

I'm gonna echo what directrealist said.

Now that I kinda understand the partition mystery... I reinstalled MDK10.0 last night and had no luck with 3D, etc. So I'm going back to MDK9.2 for now... and will also look at updating the kernel.

Karl

got mdk9.2 reinstalled with nforce drivers on my a7n8x nforce2 mobo. got the ati drivers installed for my 9700 pro (not a good combo for lin 3d support) . i do notice that 3d performance is poor compared to my windows xp install for unreal2004. im gonna check out meh logs later to see if anything funky is goin on. i get great scores for gears that compares to others with simmilar setups...

(if you are reading this post looking for a solution to what is in the topic please change your bios settings to acess the windows disk to LBA. this has worked for several of us but there are exceptions)