danleff

We need a little more information. What version of Fedora and ndiswrapper are you using? Did you install the kernel source package before compiling ndiswrapper (the kernel-devel package)? Did you consult the ndiswrapper wiki for Fedora installations, located here? Quote: already did the NDISWRAPPER thing. when i do NDISWRAPPER -L this comes out: athfmwdl driver installed, hardware present netgw11t driver installed OK, so you installed both driver sets. did you install the ones recommended by the the wiki page, item #17 under Netgear? NOT the ones that came with your driver CD for the device. Quote: when i do IWLIST SCANNING i get INTERFACE DOESNT SUPPORT SCANNING when i do IWCONFIG i get NO WIRELESS EXTENSIONS What interface? Is there a wlan0 one that is listed? The freezing issue is probably related to the 4k kernel stack size/freezing issue, which is probably an issue, due to the Windows drivers requiring that a limit to 4 stacks needing to be disabled. The Fedora specific page describes how to correct this problem. I assume that you did either /sbin/modprobe ndiswrapper to get the interface up, or have tried to auto-load the drivers on startup by previously doing the ndiswrapper -m command, once you installed the drivers?

For the package needed to mount your NTFS volumes, see this link. Remember, in Linux, you can read and copy files from NTFS, not write files to the NTFS partition(s) on your hard drive. ...and yes, the system-config-boot package will work for changing the timeouts to suit your needs. It should also be available via the Package Manager in Fedora, via your CD or DVD disk. From the dropdown menu...-->System-->add/remove applications. Click on the search button, then type in system-config, which should pop up the package and allow you to tick it and install. Or you can try Wilhelmus's suggestions.

The best way to recover your MBR for Windows, is to use the recovery console on the Windows XP installation disk. Do you have a full installation CD for Windows XP, or was Windows XP pre-installed on your system and you do not have a full install CD fore Windows XP? If you have a full installation CD for windows, use the recovery console. 1. Boot from the Windows XP startup disk. 2. When the text-based part of Setup begins, follow the prompts; choose the repair or recover option by pressing R. 3. When prompted, type the Administrator password. 4. Once you are at the recovery console, execute; Fixboot then when that is done; fixmbr 5. To exit the Recovery Console and restart the computer, type exit. Your MBR for booting windows XP should be recovered. You can delete the Linux partitions on the second drive, by usng a third party utility, like PartitionMagic, or the Windows Disk Management utility.

Generally, it is not a good ides to move the Fedora drive into another system. The reson is, that the "new" PC's hardware configuration may be significantly different from the system that it is currently configured for. Good examples would be that one system has a NVIDIA video card and the other an ATI video card and you configured the Fedora installation for the video card on the original system that it was installed on. Another example would be a significant difference in the monitor capability between one system and the other. It may or may not work right off, depending on several potential issues like this. Your two posts are a little conflicting, so let's takr a look. The grub bootloader is on the XP drive (primary master, lets say) on the original system. It is NOT on the Fedora drive itself. Just the grub reference files are on that drive. So, the bootloader is not installed on the MBR of the Fedora drive in question. Placing the Fedora drive as the first boot drive in the second system will result in no bootloader being found on the Fedora drive. Quote: Can i turn my FC5 drive to master and window xp to slave? and will it work ?if like tat? since FC5 has Grub in itself? No, you can't, without making some changes in the Grub bootloader to change the logical detection of the Fedora drive. Remember, it was originally configured as the second drive in the original system and has no grub bootloader installed on that drive. Correct? Additionally, Windows will fail to boot, as the Windows boot.ini file will try to point to the primary master drive for the XP startup files, which are now on the slave drive. There are workwrounds for this, but not for folks not used to recovering and/or editing Grub or the boot.ini file to do easily. [Edited by danleff on 2006-07-29 02:13:33] [Edited by danleff on 2006-07-29 02:14:19]

I have thought about this a bit and see pros and cons. However, the issue here is what the folks here on the forum who read and post questions would like and feel would be helpful. It may make it a little more difficult for me to sort through the posts (Linux vs. Windows), but this may just be my perception, or my limited expertise/ability to do so effectively. I also agree that some sticky posts would be helpful to quide folks to the right place in general. I like the idea of a sticky on how to post questions (general guidelines), which could save time and result in more accurate and complete answers being posted by those who would like to share possible solutions. A fair number of new members who post questions don't know how to search for answers to questions that have been asked and answered frequently. Perhaps a sticky or introductory statement could help in this regard, as well. I still like the idea of having some space dedicated to posting articles of small how-to articles on such frequently asked questions. I have placed several on my own website to refer to when needed. On the Linux side, there are a very few folks who attempt to answer questions. Having the forum combined should also increase the pool of folks who would like to post suggested solutions and share their knowledge with others. So, to make this a less winded response, Why not? Merge the two forums and give it a go! Because <signature>

Quote: but Fedora does not see the other hard drive at all, even though the installer did. Weird. I don't realy know how to get it to detect the hda Yes, Fedora does know that the other hard drive is there. In order to see the contents of the other partitions on the other drive, you need to mount them. You can see the partitons on both drives by issuing the following command, as root user, in a console; /sbin/fdisk -l Where l is the small letter "L" in -l I will try to find a good, short tutorial on how to mount partitions. I assume that you want to change the default booting OS to Windows, or is fedora booting to fast before you can select either OS? You can alter the /boot/grub/grub.conf file to accomplish either delaying the timeout to boot Fedora, or choose the OS that boots by default. There is a good GUI to do this from within Fedora. You may just need to install this package in order to use it, as I think that it is not installed by default. Sometimes, the default boots too quickly and newbies miss the options.

OK, so perhaps I misunderstood. You originally posted; Quote: And I tried once to remove FC3 using the kernel tools on the CD but GRUB remained there so I couldn't start XP. Please HELP me on this one. So this led me to believe that you hosed the FC3 partiton, or at least the contents of the partition, so the Grub bootloader does not boot either OS. Grub needs to reference these files on the root partition (or boot partition, if one was created durig the installation process) to boot properly. If this is not the case, then I did indeed misunderstand.

Just to clarify what I meant; Windows XP installation CD = Full installation CD of Windows XP (one CD) Recovery disks = On pre-installed systens,like Gateway or HP systems, a full XP CD is often not included, but a CD or set of CD disks to recover the whole system. This erases all partitions and sets the system to it's original state. ghost image = an image of the system in it's current state.

I am not aware of such a command for grub, but that does not mean that there is not one. the issue here is that you already deleted the Fedora partition, so who knows if it works from a rescue? Best to locate the XP disk and do it that way. If this is not possible, then you can try the fdisk /mbr command from a Windows 98 boot disk, or a DOS 6.2 boot disk. But realize, if this does not work, then you really need to find that XP disk. If you are sure that you do not have any of the utilities installed, as noted in the articles that I referenced (such as a third party bootloader of some sort, or a special bootmanager), then you can try this fix.

Your modem is designed to establish an Internet connection both from USB and from an Ethernet connection. You can connect one box to USB and another to the ethenet port, with a CAT5 cable. The best 9and easiest) way to do this, is to establish a connection to the ethernet port on the router (modem) and run both Linux and Windows from an ethernet connection. Of course, this is if you have either an ethernet card in the system, or have an onboard ethernet chip on the motherboard itself. If you don know, give the make and model of the motherboard and we can tell you if there is an onboard NIC on the motherboard. Of course, if there is not, you would need to know if there is a PCI ethernet card in the system or not. You can get this information from within Linux or Windows. See if your provider can offer support about switching to an ethernet connection. You should be able to re-install with the provider supplied CD (in Windows) after connecting to ethernet only (without USB), but check with them first. Explain what you are tring to do. Once you have a connection to ethernet, Ubuuntu will pick up the NIC card to the router. However, the question is, do you have a username and password that is needed to connect to the provider? This would have to be configured in Ubuntu. This is what I meant by usng the providers installation CD in Windows. The installation process should have asked you during the installation phase, what the username and password was (that was given to you by your provider) to establish the connection. Either way, you need this information to establish a connection in Linux, or in Windows. The installation CD assisted you in the process in order to configure the Windows connection correctly. If your ADSL connection is always on (no username and password needed to connect, such as in broadband), then disregard this username and password information.

I will try to answer your questions, one by one, but I have limited time right now. You need to stick to one plan. Quote: I used partition magic to re-partition 25GB to FAT32 and added the new partition as a logical partition (on the end of the drive). I rebooted and ran the repair utility twice, once with the fedora drive as primary and second with the SATA drive primary. Each time I ran the shell command #chroot /mnt/sysimage then used the exit command to reboot. The problem is unchanged, The only reason that you may need a fat32 partition, is if you want to share information easily with Fedora and windows, without installing the Linux NTFS package to recognize the NTFS partition. By running just chroot /mnt/sysimage, gets you to the root of Fedora, so you can run any additional commands, like grub-install. Exiting and rebooting withour running any commands does nothing to change anyting. Quote: I even tried the "upgrade" utility on the fedora install disc, hoping taht would change the MBR, which it would, except that it never actually completed the update process because (big surprise) there were no available updates on the disc. (I had hoped it would do it anyways, but no such luck). Using the upgrade option does nothing, as you are not up[censored] from one Fedora release to another. Quote: I would like to create a new 10GB partition as the PRIMARY partition on the windows drive (SATA, and of course I will have that set in the BIOS first). This will have the unfortunate side-effect of overwriting the existing MBR and not letting Windows boot. I intend to immediately run the full Fedora 5 install on this new partition, which SHOULD see both drives, and both of the existing OS's (plus the new FC5 I am about to install). From there, I want to set GRUB to load off that partition, where I can choose FC5 of secondary drive, FC5 of primary drive, or WinXP. DO NOT create any other partitions, especially a pirmary partition at the beginning of the drive. This will render Windows XP unable to boot, as you have changed the partition structure and logical order of the partitions. The Windows XP boot.ini file is now set to boot windows on the first partition of the sata drive. This wilkl result in a failure to boot Windows XP. The install Fedora, you want empty, unpartitioned space on the primary drive. Quote: Now, as you may already know, there are 2 separate MBR's on each drive. I have 3 questions about this procedure: Right now, you have Grub only on the MBR of the second drive and the Windows boolopader on the sata drive. Quote: WIll creating this new primary partition have a catastrophic effect on my existing WinXP iunstallation? Yes, as described above. Do not create any partitions on the beginning of the sata drive. Quote: Also, that link you sent is great, except that I am trying to get this dual HD / dual-boot wirking with a combination of SATA and IDE. You need to have the order in the bios setup as when Windows XP was oririnally installed on the system. In your case, sata first, then the ide drive second. Quote: To answer your last question, I have all the installation discs I need to start from scratch. Complete data loss, including MBR and key OS files, is OK, as long as I've tried every other possibility first. So, you do not have a full installation CD for Windows (one CD), but recovery CD disks for recovering the whole system? Quote: Sorry for all the multiple posts, but I re-read your entire tutorial, including the section about sata drives, and I thought perhaps I should try this first: make SATA drive primary, then run linux rescue, then #chroot /mnt/sysimage #grub-install --recheck /dev/sda Will that install grub on the sata drive (and hopefully give me a menu when I boot off that drive)? Yes, it will install the grub bootloader on the MBR of the sata drive. but what I do not know for sure, is if Grub will pick up the windows XP information, since the XP installation (drive) was not present when you installed Fedora originally. Try it and see. If Windows XP is not detected, you can try to add the entry in Grub later on to boot XP, with a little work.

Thereare some pitfalls that I have seen in trying to use the recovery process, but this may be related to my complicated system setup. If you re-install Fedora, there are also some problems making sure that you install to the correct MBR (when using two hard drives and installing to a second hard drive) which I have not tried yet myself. There is usually always a way to recover. but, this may require a little work. But, if you want to throw caution to the wind, try the method that I discussed here. 1. Boot into rescue mode using the Fedora Installation disk. 2. Allow the install disk to detect your installation and mount sysimage. 3. Try the alternate command; grub-install --recheck /dev/hda If this works, and grub comes up on reboot, note if there is an "other" option, which would be Windows XP. If not, don't worry yet. Realize, that if things get mucked-up, that you will lose the ability to boot into XP right off. But, if you have your full installation CD of windows, you can recover, if needed. So, data is one thing, but can you afford to muck-up XP?

Quote: My main computer is a compaq laptop. I use the ethernet port on the modem for internet access. There is also a USB port on the back of the modem. I want to be able to use that USB port to get my old p233 online. I am currently out of a job an literally have no money so purchasing a 20 dollar ethernet card is out of the question (i know its sad). OK, then you pick the harder of the two options. Your system is very old. How much physical memory is in the system and how much hard drive space do you have? The importance of this will become apparent as we move on. Quote: After I get into a desktop, i start tinkering around with the pppconfig stuff. It tells me that it sees "1 connection, eth0..." so I run the test. At this point the USB light on the modem turns GREEN!! I think YAY! However my excitement is short lived when it tells me that there was no response from the device and the config program times out. pppoconfig is for dialup and DSL, not broadband, which I assume is what you have. Debian uses the dhcpcd package to connect to broadband. You did not answer my question about your level of experience with Debian. I never used Blackbox, but let's move on, since you don't have KDE or Gnome installed, that would give you more graphical and user friendly interfaces to work with. Start with the article that I referenced. Pay special attention to the section on using USB on the modem. This is where your system specificatons will come into play. Do you have the kernel source package installed on the system? Let's look at if there is any detected connection at all right now. Probably not, but do you see an eth0 entry with an IP and various statistics when you type in as root user in a console; ifconfig If not, see if the drivers are in fact being loaded. Type in; lsmod to get a list of the loaded modules (that's the small letter L in lsmod). Is there an entry listed for CDCEther and/or af_packet? If not, you probably either need to have the kernel source installed or recompile the kernel to add the module. There are other ways to do this, as well. I'll look at my Debian box to see what is there, as well. BTW, the corrected link that you gave is here. Let's see if that works.

OK, now it is time to tell us a little about your system. Why? Because what you do, depends on what your system specifications are and how the system is set up. Can you post the make and model of your system? you posted; Quote: As to why I wanna do this, well my mobo doesn't have any drivers for Linux so the system basically sucks, hehe. Well, 99% of the time, you don't need "drivers" for the motherboard, unless it is a very new system/motherboard. If it is, then Fedora Core 3 was not a good choice, since your hardware is newer than what "drivers" are included in Fedora Core 3. Removing the Fedora partition, as you found out, does not remove the grub bootloader files written on the MBR. Now the actual grub reference files have been removed (by removing the Fedora partition where they resided). Now you need to restore the MBR to it's original state. You don't have a Windows XP installation disk. What do you have? Do you have recovery disks for the system, say if it's a Compaq, HP or Gateway system? In other words, was XP pre-installed on the system and do you have any recovery disks? There is a method to restore the MBR via using a Windows 98 floppy boot disk that is available in various sites. This method may work, but in some cases, it does not, depending on the system setup. See this reference and Microsoft's own faq on this subject here. Of course, you need to have a backup plan if this fails, which is why I ask about your system and what Windows XP recovery options that you have.

Your comments have prompted me to make some additions to the article, to make it more complete. Quote: Oops, there was no info about dual HDs on the Fedora website. I know. There is no easily found information on this on the Fedora site. I wonder about the wiki page? Let me look more at my article and get back to you. But you have three options; 1. Try to recover grub to your boot drive. I have not done this before w/o having the Windows drive installed, then putting it back into place. So, I want to look at this more fully. Fedora has some quirks that I have found in this process. 2. Re-install Fedora to the second drive, making sure that the Windows drive is in the box and also making sure that the bootloader is set to install on the boot drive. 3. Make free space on the Windows drive (if you have room) and install to the first drive. Revising my article to add some points may help with this process. Disk management in XP is discussed in this Microsoft Article, but it is overly complicated and somewhat confusing, I think.

Could you kindly give us some more information to help to know what you have already tried? How much experience fo you have with Linux, specifically Debian? I assume that you installed Debian by way of the full set of CD disks? If though the netinstall CD, then you did have a connection during the installation? If via the full set of Debian CD disks (or DVD) did you attempt to set up the connection during the installation? What GUI are you using, Gnome or KDE? Telling us that you have an "old box" does not give us information on the system that you are using, specifically, what USB interface that it uses (EHCI vs. OHCI). However, it seems that the modem is at least seen, but not set-up with an active internet connection. This is where some knowledge of Linux will come in handy to see if and how the connection can be easily established. If you are a new user to Linux, or Debian, the easiest way to get the system going on the internet is to install an inexpensive NIC card. This should get you up and running easily. If you want to tackle the USB connection (have some experience with Linux) then we will reference this how-to article, which speaks to setting up a different modem, but one which uses the same driver that is needed to get the connection going.

Can you give us a little more information? Quote: I am connecting to the internet with a usb. A USB what, modem? Can you give a make and model number? Are you connecting to the internet via broadband, dialup or DSL? Which provider? Do you have an Ethernet (NIC) card in your system? If you don't know, what is the make and model of your system? The CD from the Internet provider helps to configure your network for Windows, of course, not for Linux. Knowing the answer to the questions posed will help us understand what type of Internet connection that you have and possibly how to connect to the Internet successfully.

My comments will be brief, only because we have dioscussed this on multiple threads in the last few months. Quote: I am very new to Linux, so I installed a clean FC5 onto a separate HD than my Windows XP drive. In FC5, the package manager says grub is installed, but I still have to switch the HDs in the BIOS to determine which OS to use, there is no Grub prompt of any kind. I may have missed a step, as I'm not really sure exactly how to prodeed. You installed Fedora using all the default settings, which placed Grub on the IDE drive, not your boot drive. Fedora assumes you want grub installed on the drive that you install it to, unless you tell it otherwise. Quote: I'm guessing I need to run some software on my Windows drive to restructure the partitions or something, I'm not sure. If that is the case, what software? If you previously partitioned all your drives with Windows, or used the nTFS filesystem, this could have been your problem. You can actually use windows itself to make free space on the Windows drive, so Fedora will install on it. However, you already have Fedora on the second drive and I suggest that you try to get this going correct first. Quote: Also, FC5 sees my XP drive and vice versa, but neither can read data from the other. This doesn't surprise me with Windows (which is partly why I'm migrating), but what do I need to do to set up FC5 to read my Windows data? Windows does not read Linux partitions natively. Fedora will read NTFS partitions, with a package installed to do so after the installation. However, writing to NTFS volumes is not fully supported yet, so don't expect this. Fedora reads fat32 partitons natively. I'm just starting to complete an article on the whole subject, but it is not finished yet. However, you can read it here. Part of the article will answer, or attempt to answer your questions. Remember, this is a work on progress. Also, see this thread which points to some of the recent threads on this subject.

Well, I saw my typo, just to make the corrections for anybody to see. The list of revisions for this card should have been; Revision A1 Revision A2 Revision B1 this one is yours with the Ralink chipset Revision D1 In any case, you can get this dongle to work by using ndiswrapper and your native Ralink drivers for Win 2000 on the driver cd. See this thread that I found. You will need to consider how your system connects to the Internet and make the appropriate modifications. For example, does your ISP use a static or dynamic (DHCP) connection. Also, realize that you need to know your essid name for the router and passphrase (WEP or WPA), if you have these configured in the router.

Realize that these dongles are made to use with Windows, with Windows drivers made for them only. However, you can use the Windows drivers possibly to get it to work in Linux. Can you look at the device and tell us what revision that you have of the dongle. There are several; Revision A1 Revision A2 Revision B1 Revision B1 The revision will determine what the chipset is on the dongle and assist in how to get it going.

Your best bet is to visit this distro's website and look at the how-to section, located here. There are some native tools for USB wireless support in this distro, so I suggest you ask the folks on the forum, to get a quick and accurate answer to your questions.

Do you have a full installation CD of Windows XP? if so, pop in the XP disk and allow it to boot to the options menu. Pick "R" for rescue mode. At the resulting command line, issue the fixboot command. When this is finished, issue the fixmbr command. Exit out of the utility and see if this allows a normal XP boot. Realize,that you must know the administrator password for XP for this to work. This also assumes that you have a full installation CD of Windows. If Windows was not pre-installed on your system and you don't have a full installation Cd for Windows, let us know.

First, let's look at the grub error; 21 : Selected disk does not exist This error is returned if the device part of a device- or full file name refers to a disk or BIOS device that is not present or not recognized by the BIOS in the system. Now, from your post; Quote: Pri. Master Disk: LBA, ATA 33, 46116MB Pri. Slave Disk: none It's got two IBM hard drive's in it...one slaved to the other, which is odd it says none above. If this is what the bios reports, then the bios is not seeing the second drive. Without knowing what motherboard that you have, so we can know what bios is in the system, you will have to proceed accordingly. If the drive was seen by the bios before installing Fedora, then the older bios that you have is not seeing the secondary drive because either; 1. The drive went south, or; 2. The geometry of the drive is not being seen correctly by the older bios in your system, with the linux partitions on it. Try getting into the bios and setting the drive from "auto" detect to "LBA" mode. this changes how the bios sees the geometry of the drive. Older bios' have issues with this and changing to LBA mode usually solves this problem. Then see if the drive is seen by the bios. It would be nice to know the model number of the affected drive. What size hard drive is it? Quote: Was accessing the second hard drive just peachy in windows, then I tried to put fedora core 5 on it. During installation, I selected to put grub on MBR, but it did install a boot directory on the second hard drive as well. I also selected it to load Other (which I labeled windows) by default. To begin with it simply booted up into windows like grub didn't exist In a default Fedora installation on a second hard drive, Fedora assumes that that is the only drive in the system, unless you pick the advanced partition option when formatting the drive during the installation. A boot directory on the drive is always made, which houses the vmlinux, initrd, config file, grub reference files and system.map file. If you choose to install the actual booloader to the second drive (which is by default in your case when you installed Fedora), the MBR is written to the second drive. Hence, this is why you booted right into Windows. The MBR of the actual boot drive (primary master) still had the bootloader for Windows only. Now, this is where things get cloudy. You boot into rescue mode. Did you make sure that the sysimage was loaded? in Fedora Core 5, during the recue boot, Fedora tries to see the installation and mount the sysimage. You get a message asking if you want to do this, or skip the detection. If there is something wrong, the image is not mounted and you should have received a message that not all the files were loaded. If you choose the skip this step, then you need to mount the sysimage manually. Then you can do the grub-install --recheck /dev/hda Same applies to running; Quote: I then tries entering into grub itself and typing: root (hd1,0) setup (hd0) quit Then to respond to your other question; Quote: Anyhow, my grub.conf is as follows: (tho is it even using it, if it's got a boot directoy on the secondary hard drive?) Two differnt issues, as described above. There is a /boot partition, with the reference files described above in it. The MBR is installed wherever you put it, with the actual bootloader.

Quote: Originally I chose option 1 and after it didn't woork I went to option 2. As I only have music and photos on the HD I am happy to only run FC5 as I have all the discs anyway. I am away at the moment and don't have the Windows disc so I can't go back. It's FC5 for me. Ok, I thought from your description, that Windows was still installed. So, you can't use Windows to resize the drive partitions. Knoppix has a utility called qtparted which can graphically give you an idea what the partition structure is on the drive. It would be interesting to see what partitions are on the drive now. The other way is to type in, as root user in knoppix, in a terminal window; fdisk -l (that's the small letter L in -l) then post what that says. but i suspect one of two other possible issues. 1. Did you check the validity (integrity) of the installation DVD at the beginning of the installation? 2. Your graphics card. This is an ATI video card on the system, correct? 3. Just for the sake of completness, what exact model is the motherboard? Asus has a couple of A8 via based motherboards out there. A8V A8V-E SE A8V-MX

In Ubuntu, you can manually remove the Grub entriee, but this still leaves the actual older kernel-image instact on your system. Best to follow the suggestions noted on this thread] to do so. But, make sure that your current (new) kernel is working properly first! The older kernel entries are left there for a reson, if the new kernel fails for some reason, you have a fallback. If you want to still manually edit the menu.lst file, I think the correct terminal command would be; gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst as root user.