Hi everyone,

I just switched from Mandrake to SuSE day before yesterday and I must say I'm impressed with SuSE thus far. It has a very nice look.

During the installation of SuSE, I was hoping to be able to wipe the hardrive clean and start over with just SuSE installed. Well as the process was going along, a screen told me that since my memory fell way below 96 mb for a graphical install that it was going to use hda5 as swap space to be able to install SuSE. The whole process went without almost any hitches (except for not being able to do a gui install). During installation it never asked me if I wanted to keep Mandrake and create a partition for SuSE or if I wanted to delete everything.

Now what makes me believe Mandrake is still there is the hard drive is a 5 gb hd. SuSE says 1.75 gb are free, 2.80 gb have been used. Grub is the default bootloader SuSE is using currently but when I start up Mandrake is not listed. Is there anyway I can tell if Mandrake is still on those extra 2 or so odd gigs? I've heard of people having more trouble with Grub than LiLo on booting different systems and I'm wondering out of curiosity if the bootloader is why I can't see Mandrake in the list. If I do find Mandrake, will I be able to remove it and just have SuSE or would I have to go back and reinstall SuSE?

Thanks everyone


Ps- I'm using SuSE 9.1 Personal edition

"Is there anyway I can tell if Mandrake is still on those extra 2 or so odd gigs?"

The logical unit that you need to work with is the partition. Mandrake was installed on a partition. If you installed SuSE on the same partition then Mandrake is gone. If you installed SuSE to a different partition than the Mandrake partition then Mandrake is still there.

If the Mandrake partition made it through the SuSE install unscathed then you can take a look at it using the mount command. For example, if Mandrake was on /dev/hda3 then you can take a look at Mandrake with:

mkdir /mandrake
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /mandrake
ls -l /mandrake

If you find Mandrake is still there then you can add it as an option to grub so that grub gives you a choice of booting either SuSE or Mandrake.

If you want to remove Mandrake then you can format the Mandrake partition and wipe it clean.

umount /mandrake
mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda3

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Steve Stites

When I was installing SuSE 9.1 over Mandrake 10.0, HDA6 remained so I chose "use entire disk" and it whiped it out.

thanks guys for your input. I tried as you reccomended jailbait and it appears Mandrake is gone but the mystery about where that space is continues. But I might be wrong about Mandrake not being there because one option that I typed as you reccomended ls -l /mandrake returned this:

total 1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Nov 13 05:43
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 592 Nov 13 05:43

but judging from the rest of the output apparently Mandrake isn't there. I dunno about that part above though. I appreciate your help very much Thank you.

"one option that I typed as you reccomended ls -l /mandrake returned this:

total 1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 48 Nov 13 05:43
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 592 Nov 13 05:43
"

That means that the directory /mandrake is empty. There is nothing there. However, I doubt that you mounted the mandrake partition on /mandrake because if you did then ls -l /mandrake should show a directory named /lost+found.

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Steve Stites