danleff

Well, your situation possibly is a little unique. It seems that Linux has some troubles with the ITE8212 interface. I found two articles on the subject, one located here specifically speaks to the issue. Quote: it wants to install the Grub to the MBR of /dev/hde. Change that to be MBR on /dev/sda (as the first booting drive), install, reboot, and XP starts. No Grub. No change. I assume that you used the custom disk partitioning scheme when you did this? Otherwise, generally, you would get two choices, the begining of the boot sector on the installed drive, or the MBR. Otherwise, If you used the "advanced configure bootloader" checkmark under the custom partition layout section, you don't see these options. Quote: Windows sees the 102MB partition on the PATA as active, but pulling the drive makes no change - XP still works, no FC5. You mean that you pulled the pata drive? This will, of course, not work for two reasons. One is that grub needs to reference some files on the pata drive, and need the drive itself present to load the system. Quote: Try again, this time leaving Grub to be where it wanted - /dev/hde MBR. Same, no FC5, XP boots. This will not work either. the grub bootloader is still on the pata drive, not the boot drive. This system, besides having the unusuall pata interface rather than a standard IDE port, has some complex bios settings to consider. If you take a look at the users manual, under the bios section, you will see what I mean. There are several comments about setting the bios correctly with multiple drives in the system.

When you say that the memory and hard disk are fine, do they meet the recommended requirements? * 4GB free space on the hard disk * 512MB RAM

...and the answer to the question that I posed; Quote: Are you going to install Windows, or another flavor of Linux? This is not a Dell or Gateway system and is a desktop system? If you are going to install Windows, what version are you going to install? Do you still have the Fedora disks? What I am getting at, is what are you going to be doing with the hard drive and what possible drive formatting utilities that you might have on hand. The answer lies in what you want to do with the system and the best way to accomplish it.

Great, zenarcher! I was trying to remember where this one was. it is in my archives now.

My first question was, does this unit have a 32-bit CardBus slot? I see from the product description, that it does. The card has a Broadcom chipset. So, my second question is, what have you done to try and get it working so far? Did you install SuSE with the card in the slot and try to configure the network during the installation? Have you had the card in the slot before you booted the system? Have you tried to configure it in Yast using ndiswrapper? Sorry for all the questions, but we need to know exactly where you are at this point. Your post did answer a bunch of questions. Basically, you need to install drivers to get the card to work. This can be a bit complicated in some cases, but knowing what you tried so far will help. If you don't understand anything I posted, just ask.

What are you looking for in term of video? If you need 3D support, see the Unofficial Fedora FAQ section on NVIDIA drivers. That section also speaks to using yum repositories and how to set it up.

OK, as long as you are sure it is a prism 2 based chip. There apparently are a few models/revisions of this card. See the link that I found from yours on the subject here. Note section 4 on identifying the chipset by the FCC ID number. Try inserting the card before you boot up. I have no idea if hotplugging this catd works. What methods have you tried to get it working, or how do you know that it is not detected?

Nice thread folks! Good troubleshooting on all parts!

See the Unofficial Fedora faq page. Realize, that you can mount and read NTFS partitions {if that is what you have on the XP system}, but do not attempt to write to an NTFS volume. You may also want to reference the Fedora wiki for general information and tips.

Are you inserting the card before or after you boot the system? Can you post the exact make and model of the laptop? Also, pleae confirm that this is a cardbus adapter that you are using? This is an unusual card and I can't find much on it. Prism chipset?

Boot up the RedHat installation CD and get into the system by typing in at the installation window linux rescue Once you are at the console as root user, then type in chroot /mnt/sysimage You can then edit again or run the grub-install command to rescue the grub bootloader. But before you do this, is it possible to post the grub.conf or menu.lst file, so we can have a look at it? Did you copy and paste the original one on your first post, or hand type it in? The reason why I ask, is that there is an error in the entry. #boot=/dev/sda default=1 timeout=10 splashimage=(hs0,0)/boot/grub/splash/xpm.gz title Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (2.4.21-27.0.1.EL) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.21-27.0.1.EL ro root=LABEL=/ initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.21-27.0.1.EL.img title Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (2.4.21-20.0.1.EL) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.21-20.0.1.EL ro root=LABEL=/ initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.21-20.0.1.EL.img

Great! This thread got you thinking about the problem and to find a solution for your particular situation. So, Fedora allowed you to point to the slave drive w/o mapping the drive! Good work!

Sorry for not being exact. Boot the installation cd. At the installation menu, type in linux rescue and hit the enter key. Once Fedora goes through the initial setup of the system, you should get a menu with the choices of partitions to mount on sysimage. Pick the correct one, in your case, it should be /dev/hdb2. When you get to a command line, type in; chroot /mnt/sysimage Then try the grub-install --recheck /dev/hda command.

Oh well, I thought the same thing, as the default was what you wanted anyway. But, it sounds like you made an error using vi to change the grub file. Did you use the "e" or "i" keyboard option to edit or input the changes, before saving them? If this is a Dapper cd, go to System-->Administration-->Disks-->Partitions and enable the one you want, browse for a folder in which it'll be mounted and then you should be able to edit the grub file again. I prefer to use Midnight Commander for editing (less chance for errors), but I'm not sure that it is installed in Ubuntu's live cd.

Try using the hidenmenu command; #boot=/dev/sda default=1 timeout=10 splashimage=(hs0,0)/boot/grub/splash/xpm.gz hiddenmenu title Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (2.4.21-27.0.1.EL) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.21-27.0.1.EL ro root=LABEL=/ initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.21-27.0.1.EL.img title Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES (2.4.21-20.0.1.EL) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.21-20.0.1.EL ro root=LABEL=/ initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.21-20.0.1.EL.img This should then give you the option to hit the <esc> key to show both entries, say if the older kernel fails and you want to show both entries and boot the new kernel. You will just have a few seconds to do this, before the system will try to boot the old kernel.

Quote: I installed XP on one disk alone and then removed it and installed FC5 on another disk. This is a mistake. There is no need to remove drives. What you did in effect, is to remove the XP drive, so that when Grub was installed it has no bios mapping in Grub for the XP drive. Fedora thought that you were installing on a single drive, which you were. It does not know about the XP drive. You should have installed Fedora with the XP drive in the system, as you would normally have it. Now, with both drives in the system, the XP drive as the master and the Fedora as the slave, try getting into linux rescue, chroot into the Fedora root partition (hdb2) and run; grub-install --recheck /dev/hda

OK, so you found out that you needed to switch the drive order around, as it has changed for some reason, either due to how you installed Fedora and the boot order of the drives at the time. Did you change the boot order of the drives at all when you installed Fedora? You now have grub, with either OS in the menu. Interestingly, I just set up a laptop with PCI express, which gave Fedora fits. There are two possible issues. The PCI-express on your system and the video card. Let's look at the video card first. If you got no errors loading Fedora, except for the lack of a GUI... If you know how to use vi, then try the following first. get into Fedora as root user, the command line, in your case. Navigate to /etc/X11 directory; cd /etc/X11 (capital "X" in X11) Then do vi xorg.conf Scroll down to the section for the video card, say something like; Section "Device" Identifier "Videocard0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "Videocard vendor" BoardName "nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX Replace the "nvidia" entry next to Driver from "nvidia" with "vesa" Save the changes. Reboot and see what happens. If you need further instructions on the usage in vi, let us know. If the usage of vi seems to be a problem for you, let us know. We can try another utility to edit the xorg file. If this does not work, we can look at the pci-express issue.

Quote: I initially installed FC5 over the MBR which of course killed the XP boot loader. This did not bring up the GRUB boot loader screen which usually gives you a choice of OS. What happens? does it seem that Fedora boots right off, and did it boot OK? Usually what happens is that an option to boot Fedora comes up. Then when you hit the enter key, a menu comes up with a choice for Fedora and "other." Other, of course is Windows. The problem is that the default boot choice time is very fast and it is easy to miss. Quote: I looked for the /boot directory in /ETC its wasn't there??? There is no boot diretory in /etc. Where it is depends on what type of installation you did. If you did the installation with the default settings, then a /boot partition is created. It would be it's own unique partition. If you preformatted the drive and used "expert partitioning" then the boot partition is on the root filesystem on the drive. So, not in /etc, but in /boot. If you choose on the beginning of the linux partition, then the /boot directory (folder) would be in the same place. Quote: I did a DF to check the ouputs but still no /boot directory?? It looks like the /boot directory is on the root filesystem, which is why it does not show under df. It should be under /boot, with the grub files on the subdirectory/grub. /boot/grub.

Yes, networking with another box has always been a mistery in SuSE for me. In Lindows, it can be done automatically. In Puppy Linux, they used LinNeighborhood. In the older versions, they actually linked to an article that I wrote on how to get it going. It is now very much automated. I assume you just want to share some folders and files from another Windows box? I looked in the SuSE wiki, but this article needs editing and is quite technical. Let me look at my SuSE installation and see what I find. It's been a little while. Are the folders in the Windows box marked to share with others on the Network? BTW, I'm glad you got the WPA2 up and going. All I could find were links relevent to either having both Gnome and KDE installed, during the base installation, or having KDE installed by default. So, the easiest solution for you was to do a re-installation. I too like KDE, but it looks like SuSE has moved away from this in favor of Gnome.

Looks like WPA2 has been discussed in various places. See the article here. I'm looking for a good article on installing KDE POST install of Suse 10.1, but have not had too much luck. Hmm...much easier in Ubuntu.

Looks like WPA2 has been discussed in various places. See the article here. I'm looking for a good article on installing KDE POST install of Suse 10.1, but have not had too much luck. Hmm...much easier in Ubuntu.

This is why I don't like to use Windows setup to format the hard drive. Take a look at this article on formatting the drive with XP setup. If XP is working fine, take a look at the F drive and see if it is empty. If it is, defrag the C drive. Then you can use the Disk Management utility to delete the F drive partition desigation. See the Microsoft article on the subject here. Then try to reinstall Fedora.

OK, I may have a possible reason for the problem. It seems that some systems have a recovery partition for XP. I would guess that Grub is invoking that recovery partition, not the actual XP OS partition. Can you make sure that you post what make and model computer that you have?

Three. OK four quick questions. 1. What "restore" program came up? 2. What exact make and model PC is this? 3. Did you actually point the Fedora installation to the pre-formatted partition that you made, or allow a default installation during the partitioning phase? 4. I also assume the Fedora installation was on the same hard drive with Windows (one hard drive in the system)?

If i am missing for a few days, it's because I am installing SuSE 10.1 (or lost track of this thread). Things may have changed a little, so I can't make an informed response right now. Zenarcher, do you have a quick answer for this, since you have a running installation going?