danleff

The problem with responding to these posts is that it is difficult to see everyting that folks have done before they post on these forums. In you case, it looks like you installed grub from Ubuntu on the MBR of the actual boot drive. Then you installed Fedora on the second hard drive and did not tell it to install the bootloader on the MBR of the boot drive, hda. So, now what you have is the old grub bootloader from ubuntu looking for that distrro and it does not find it. Posting the exact boot error message would be helpful, but I can guess what happened. You accepted the default partitioning option and grub options when installing Fedora on the second drive. Grub is installed on the /boot partition on that drive. Just in case, do you have a full Windows installation CD to recover Windows, if necessary?

Mandrake 9 is an older version and probably does not fully support your current hardware. Quote: could produce a bootable version from the iso's I downloaded and picked up a version from Linux User& issue 59 of Mandriva 2006, however it stopps on boot with an error message: Did you mean to say that you could not produce a bootable version from the iso's that you downloaded? If so, how exactly did you burn the iso images and at what speed? The disk that you have is a live CD version of Mandriva. There could be a number of reasons why it does not boot. Mandriva recommends 512 mb of memory for this version of the Live CD. There could be some physical damage to the CD. Are there any physical scratches on the disk? But it looks to me that there is not enough available ram in your system to run it. Could you post the make and model of PC that this is? Laptop or desktop?

Please stick to the new thread that you posted, so we can keep your specifc issue in one place. See the thread that you started for a response.

I think what the Fedora site needs is some warnings about how to do the installations in general on a second hard drive. Please bear with me, as there are multiple posts on this issue (..and I mean multiple posts). One more time. If you are installing Fedora, or any other linux OS on a second slave hard drive, you can't accept the default options to install. Any Linux OS assumes that you have one hard drive in the system. Installing on a second drive is fine, but you have to change the Grub bootloader to match the system. Accepting the default options installs grub on the same drive that you did the installation on, not the drive you are booting from when the system starts. So, your system has the XP bootloader on the primary master and the bootloader for Fedora on the master slave. The system is booting from the primary maseter and has no idea that you have grub on the second drive, unless you tell it so. It boots into Windows directly, as there is no grub bootloader on the primary master drive for Linux, or anything that can boot Fedora, Please stop trying to install Fedora with the drives changed to different cables and boot orders. This screws up the system. Quote: So I swapped the drives in the bays and reinstalled. Now I can run FC5 but I can't get to XP ( It's listed as "Other" in GRUB... and trying to load it gives me a Noverify line and a chainloader + 1 command... but I get no XP. Correct. Now what you have done is changes the physical designation of the drives, The former slave drive is now master, but XP does not boot, because the XP boot.ini file, which grub invokes, is pointing to the wrong drive. It thinks that XP is still on the primary master. It is now on the primary slave. Quote: Someone posted a script... but it didn't work. What script are you referring to? We have no idea what you are talking about, unless you tell us. It would be helpul if you could tell us what exact "script" you used and how you tried to invoke it. Quote: I tried booting of the CD and performing an upgrade to change the boot loader configuration.. but everytime I try it says "no kernel installed.. your boot loader configuration will not be changed" You can't do an upgrade installation. There is nothing to upgrade. Upgrade refers to moving from one version of Fedora to another newer one. Put the drives back into their correct order. There is no need to change the physical drive orders. Before we go any further, do you have the full installation CD for XP, or just the recovery disks from Compaq? ...and please, stick to this thread when discussing the issue. You tagged onto another post that I just saw that gives me more information, but we need to keep all the information on one thread.

Oops! Missed the last post, or we posted close to each other. So, the hard drive that Fedora is installed on is the secondary slave drive, or hdd. You chose the default partitioning scheme in Fedora, which uses LVM, or Logical Volume Management. Grub seems to be installed on partition hdd1. So, my question still stands, how many hard drives are in the system? If possible, what can help is to post the output of /sbin/fdisk -l. That is the small letter "L" Just post the drive/partition designations that you find, such as hda1 etc...forget all the other data.

Quote: There are two drives on the system labeled "HDD1" and "HDD2" Where is this labeled this way? In the bios, or elsewhere. Quote: I believe that it's hd0 and hd1, or HDD1 and HDD2 Let's not get the different designations for the hard drives mixed up. In the bios, most likely if you look in the bios boot order, the designations are HDD0 for the primary master drive and HDD1 for the primary slave drive, and so on. hd0 and hd1 are the primary drive designations in the grub.conf or menu.lst files. Linux (not grub) sees the drives as; hda = primary master drive hdb = primary slave drive hdc = secondary master drive ...and so on. In the /boot/grub/device.map file, the drives are linked, depending on the boot order; hd0 /dev/hda hd1 /dev/hdb ..and so on. When using grub-install, you use the assigned designation, hence the grub-install /dev/hda tells grub to install the bootloader in the master boot record of the primary master drive, which is usually the boot drive on most systems, unless you changed this in the bios. One of the issues may be the make and model system that you have. can you post the make and model of your system?

It seems that you accepted all the default settings when you originally installed Fedora. In the installation summary window, during the installation, there is a section on Grub that allows you to set where grub is installed. If you accepted the default partitioning scheme, then grub was most likely installed on it's own small boot partition, but not bootable, because you have XP installed on hda1. From your description, it looks like you have two hard drives in the system? If this is the case, then grub, by default probably installed on the second hard drive. Is there really an hdd1, or are you just trying random drives to install grub to? Your designations for the hard drives are also incorrect. If you install grub into your MBR of the drive that is booting (assuming your primary master), then the command would be; grub-install /dev/hda Which should be the primary master drive that you are booting from. Once you boot from the rescue cd, then you need to get to the root partition of Fedora. Just booting into the rescue mode does not do this and just gives you basic commands to work with, not the full system. Once booted into rescue mode, you need to type in; chroot /mnt/sysimage Then you can run the grub-install command. But, how many drives are in the system? this will help explain why grub was not isntalled correctly.

I can't be of much help here, as I know very little about software raid. However, take a look at the Fedora Project Wiki about the progress in this area. Look under the dmraid-support in installer section.

The question is, does the hardware in the "old Dell laptop" support such a device. You did not mention what model of Dell that you have. If the Dell supports USB 1.0 rather than 2.0, you are likely to have some performance issues. In terms of a USB hard drive enclosure, Fedora supports them and will hotplug the device when plugged in or activated. I have a Metal Gear Box and have no trouble with it. The other consideration, is what are you using the external drive for, storage, or otherwise? If you plan on trying to use the external drive for installing an OS, then the bios in your system may not support booting from USB.

bunnydowell, thanks for the information. Unfortunately, this thread is over 1 1/2 years old, so the origional poster will probably not see it. Hopefully others will. Always note the dates attached to threads that you respond to to make sure that they are current and still active.

You can get flex and bison from the installation CD disks. Go to the add/remove software utility from within Fedora and do a search for these packages. All the packages that you need should be on the disks, including Mysql and PHP. Do you know how to use Fedora's package management system? You can also use yum to install the packages and this will also solve any dependency issues. Use the link that I previously gave you on the installation notes. There is also a section, I see, for Fedora Core 4.

Originally posted by andrewluo: Quote: well you lnow what? it's not that you can't have two hdds. you have to install linux on the primary master, 1st IDE channel (to simplify: install linux on hda.)but after that linux is fine but windows has problems. Not true. You can have Linux set up on a second hard drive, as long as you have the bootloader set up on the boot drive, as you say the primary master. When you install on one single hard drive to dual boot, this is often easier, as less mistakes can be made. Most defaults with installing the grub bootloader are on the same hard drive as Linux is installed on. The assumption is that most users will be using one hard drive, or have one hard drive in their systems and will be dual booting with Windows, or have Linux as their only OS. Most users have systems with one hard drive, so the default method is fine. If you want to tell Linux to install to a second hard drive, this is also fine, as long as you tell grub to boot from the actual boot drive set in the bios, usually the primary master. The mistake that is made is that most users accept the default for everything, when in fact installing to a second hard drive is a custom installation. You need to tell grub where to boot from. Now, after reading your other post and this one, we see that you have a dual boot situation on one hard drive. So, you have posted a little bit of information on two different posts. Please take this information and answer the questions that I posed on the other post and start a new thread. This way we can follow what your exact issue is more accurately. makes it a little more easy to follow!

I would sugest that you ask this exact question on the DSL forums to get the most expert answer. Let's go over what you have and see is I got it right. You have a CF card in a USB slot/adapter on the host system. You want to make DSL bootable on the CF card and transfer it to a mini-itx system, which has an adapter connected to the IDE port, a so called CF ide-adapter card. The reason that I sent you to the Via link, was to show how some mini-itx systems support booting off of such an adapter and some don't. It would be helpful to know exactly what mini-itx system that you have, but you note that it does support booting off a CF card. Good. The problem is how will you boot the mini-itx once the card is on that system. You need some sort of a bootloader. If you use grub, you really should install DSL to the Mini-itx system's CF card while it is in that system. Otherwise, you will not get a valid installation of Grub, the bootloader. Whatever system you do the installation from, grub will be set up specific to that system. If you attempt the installation from the first system and use Grub, then grub will be specific for the USB port, pointing to that. If you do the installation from the Mini-itx system, then grub will be specific to where it sees the CF card, which should be the IDE port. If you had two systems that saw the CF card the same and wanted to install on one system, then transfer to another, that would be fine. For example, if you installed to a single hard drive on one system, then transferred that hard drive to another system (set up with the hard drive on the same IDE channel as the one that it was origionally installed on), this would work. The issue is that Grub is specific for the system that it is installed on and the hard drive (in you case CF card). In theory, grub would be looking in the wrong place to boot DSL if you move the card to another system, which sees the CF card differently. Probably someone on the DSL forums has done this and they would be the best source of accurate information about this.

Can you be a little more specific? Asking the question the way you did is like saying "my car won't start, can you tell me what's wrong?" If possible start a new topic and post the following, since this thread is not specific for your problem; 1. Did you install Fedora after Windows? 2. Is Fedora installed on the same hard drive as Windows? 3. What exacrly happens when you try to boot into Windows? 4. When you installed Fedora, what disk space did you tell Fedora to take? In other words, did you tell Fedora to take space away from the Windows partition, use already empty space on the hard drive, or have a partition already set up for Linux? 5. Where did you tell Fedora to install the Grub bootloader? 6. The exact make and model of your computer. Yes, this can make a difference. Answering these questions will help to troubleshoot your particular problem.

Any reason why you are not trying Fedora Core 5? In any case, look at the Fedora Core 5 Linux Installation Notes under the relevent sections for Apache and MySQL. See if these help.

Let's look at this in a logical fashion. You should have trouble booting XP now, as you most likely deleted Grub's reference files on the Linux partition. Even if the bootloader part of Fedora is still on the MBR, you should not have a problem re-installing XP, unless you actually messed up the Windows partition. The black screen can happen for a variety or reasons. One problewm can be faulty hardware. The other is if you have sata drive(s) on your system, which XP needs the sata drivers (third party drivers) installed during the actuall installation process. Do you have sata drives on your system? I assume that you have a full installation CD of XP? If so, you can rescue the Windows MBR Bootloader by going into recovery mode and restoring the MBR with the command fixboot and fixmbr in the recovery console. Is there a reason that you want a fresh installation of XP, or do you just want to recover the current installation? When you deleted the Linux partitions, did you resize the XP partition to take up the empty space?

Let's be careful here. explore2fs is read only. From my experience, it is not fully functional. FSDEXT2 is for Windows 05 only and is read only as well. The author notes; Quote: Fsdext2 is a port of the second extended file system (ext2fs) to Windows 95; albeit a read-only version. Using FSDEXT2 you can transparently mount your Linux ext2fs partitions on Windows 95. So, you can read the volumes only from Windows 95 only. In terms of NTFS support for Fedora Core 5, look here. Please, by all means, read the instructions and release notes. Do not attempt to write from Fedora to your NTFS volumes (partitions). You can copy from NTFS to Fedora's filesystem safely.

Oops! Try the link here.

Take a look at this article about these issues and report back if any seem to be what you are experiencing.

Nice idea, but you still have to have the ability to boot off a USB drive in the bios, which beto does not have. He noted in his first post on the thread; Quote: My computer does not have a BIOS option to boot from USB. .

The simple answer is that you can't manipulate parititons that are already set, by leaving free space between partitions. This changes the way the logical layout of the partitions, how the sectors are allocated and confuses grub. And in the process, you probably corrupted partiton /dev/sda6, which holds the grub reference files, unreadable. You can leave empty space at the end of drives, not between partitions. You should never manipulate partitions like once any OS is installed, unless you really know what you are doing. The order of partitions should be laid out before installing any OS and not touched afterwards. You can, however, add partitions on the free space afterwards, but realize that if you add primary partitions, then this also changes the logical order of partitions. Did you make rescue boot disks of PartitionMagic to attempt a recovery? This is the reason why PM asks you to do this, to avoid any disaster and recover if you made a mistake.

OK, this depends on the mainboard that you are using. Take a look at the article here, which describes booting from a cf card in a via VIA EPIA MII or MS mainboard system. Look under the What should I use if I want bootable compact flash? section.

You really want to know? For an explanation, see here.

We need more information. Is your CF card attached to a USB card reader, or is it treated as an IDE disk, say in a mini-itx system? If in a USB card reader, does your system's bios support booting from USB? This article may be of some help off the DSL forums. Also, check out the DSL wiki under the Booting DSL section.

Free, no, otherwise, perhaps. If you are talking about running office applications, like Microsoft Office, Codeweavers Crossover Office is a fine product, but costs. Of course, OpenOffice is still my favorite Linux based package to run Microsoft Office applications. Star Office is also a great product. With either, you don't need Wine or Winex. For games, have you looked at Frank's Corner, which has some good tips for running games in Wine. But, Wine and Winex are still the free mainstream products that are available.