danleff

The boot corruption issue, I believe was only with Fedora Core 2 and fixed in subsequent versions. See this report. Did you find such an article relative to RedHat? Since the Windows bootloader is not working and referencing the boot.ini file, this is no good for now. What you would have done, if you could boot into XP, was place the Linux boot image on the top level NTFS partition of the Windows drive. See this article or this one as examples.

Quote: I have found that i do not have a /boot partition. Due to this I am not able to boot into windows Xp. I am comfortably logging into redhat 9. You do not need a /boot partition to boot into XP. You apparently wrote Grub to the Master Boot Record (MBR), so there is no /boot partition. If you want to dump RedHat and just use Windows, then you use both the fixboot and fixmbr commands in the Windows recovery console, after booting the XP installation disk. Otherwise, if you fix the mbr via the Windows recovery console, you will lose your ability to boot Linux, effectively writing over Grub in the MBR. I would stop trying to add things to the windows drive, such as NTLR. This is not necessary. Quote: Edited grub.conf, menu.lst and even the partition table but was left with not much sucess. What do you mean that you altered the partition table? What exactly did you do? Are you currently able to boot into RedHat? GX1 system hard drive installations are a little different. Go to the bios and see if the drive is recognized correctly. What did you set the hard drive jumper to? On these systems, you may have to set the hard drive jumper to cable select, for the drive to be seem properly. Realize that in these legacy systems, just switching hard drives does not always work. Quote: Is there any way of editing the boot.ini either from DOS or linux? From RedHat, no, as you do not have write support for NTFS volumes in a stock install of RedHat. Why do you want to do this?

Quote: What you said regarding knoppix was correct. It does have an mkinitrd command but this version doesn't seem to have all the options. I cannot use it to specify the modules with --preload option. Again, you can't mix Linux distros to try this. I don't know what kernel version is on your Knoppix disk (knowing the version of Knoppix that this is would help) but, the modules that you specify with the preload command may not be there, or reflect a series 2.4 series kernel, not a 2.6 series kernel in Fedora, which have different module names. What happens when you try the following added to the command boot line; expert rescue nofb

If you can tell us what the old motherboard and video hardware is, as well as what new motherboard and video card you plan to use, that would help. It depends on what new hardware that you have, if Fedora will pick up the new drivers automatically. Have you looked at the Fedora database to see if your new hardware will be supported? For example, if you have a NVIDIA video card and switch to an ATI card, you may have some issues, that can be solved, without a re-installation. Is the current installation of Fedora a stock installation, or have you added additional packages to say run a NVIDIA card in 3D. In other words, have you customized Fedora with any specialty drivers and such? BTW, Windows XP is not free from some of the same issues.

Ok, you are using LVM (Logical Volume Management) with fedora. I don't use this, but will try to comment. Your grub is installed on it's own partition, called /boot on the usb drive, not on the root partition of the Fedora drive. /dev/sda1 (/boot) ext3 102MB which is sda1. Your root partition is; /dev/sda2 volgroup00 LVM PV 95292MB which is sda2. Yoiu can't use a Knoppix Live Cd to do the procedure thatw as mentioned in your link. It uses a different kernel and depending on the version of Knoppix that you used, may not even have mkintrd available. You can't use Knoppix to run this proceedure, as you are booting with a different kernel by booting with Knoppix cd. Note that you are using the argument uname -r in the command string. This references that current kernel that you are using at the time, the Knoppix kernel, not the Fedora one. This will fail. This is why you are having one problem with this and need to use the same boot disk that you did the installation with. You must use a boot disk that loads the same kernel that you currently have on Fedora. Not just any Fedora boot disk. What version of Fedora comes with the book that you mentioned, the Redhat Fedora and Enterprise Linux 4 Bible book? if it is not the same as your current version, you are likely to run into issues. Try booting with the original installation cd that you originally installed Fedora with. Pass the expert rescue commands at the boot screen command line and see if it boots. This should give you a command line to work with...no graphical interface. Then try the mkinitrd command string. What you should be trying to do is boot into rescue mode, not doing a re-installation of Fedora. However, given what you said so far, i think that you have an issue with the original install disk, if you burned this disk yourself originally. What exact media did you burn the image to, a cdrw, cd-r disk?? What speed did you burn the image at? More than 4X? Do you know what rating the cdrw drive is that you burmed the images with, 4X, 24X...? Is the cdrw drive on the laptop, or burned on a cdrw drive in another system?

Yes, I was referring to the boot order in the bios that you had when you first installed and used Fedora. The two OS' run independently from each other, because you most likely have Grub on the MBR of the Fedora drive, so it boots when you have this drive set first in the bios. Windows boots when you change the boot order to boot first from the drive that has Windows on it, as the MBR of that drive has the Windows boot sequence. Since you installed Windows after Fedora, you need to make some modifications. This is why it is recommended that you not install Windows after a Linux distro. Grub has no way of knowing about Windows (since you installed it last) unless you tell it about Windows. If you installed Fedora after Windows, the installation process would have picked up Windows as a valid boot option. Of course, your hard drive sequence (how they are set up as primary master, slave, secondary master....is different from the usual setup. Windows always wants to be first, so it installs it's boot files on the first hard drive in the system, unless you tell it otherwise. In your case, your primary slave drive.

Let's take a look at this one step at a time. Quote: I ran into problems because my USB hard drive was not recognized and not listed as an option to install Linux. Then I ran Linux in expert mode which solved this problem. This time I was able to see the USB hard drive and successfully install Linux. This should have been your first clue that there would be a problem. I recently saw a post about this on another Fedora forum. This was apparently a bug in the base installation kernel having problems running the usb module (driver). Fedora is designed to be installed on an internal hard drive. Installing to a usb drive is best left for folks who know what they are doing. Quote: I chose Grub as boot loader with Linux as default option if none was selected. Since you installed in expert mode (which by the way, for some reason loads the usb driver correctly), where did you tell Fedora to install Grub? I bet to a /boot partition on the usb drive? If this was the case, thewn you need to have the bios set to boot from the usb device, which probably is USB-HD in the bios? What options do you have in the bios to boot from USB? Quote: Now I tried to boot linux with the Linux boot CD. Do you mean the first installation cd, or the boot.img file (boot cd image) from the Fedora website mirror that you downloaded the iso files from? Laptop cdrom drives are very sensative to cd media types. You need to bun a cd on quality media at a slow speed. See my article here to see what I am getting at. Again, laptop cdrom drives can be funky about booting from certain media, say cdrw disks. The speed that the disk was burned at will affect this and result in the behavior that you are experiencing. Quote: I just cannot figure out what must have happened after the Linux installation on the USB hard drive. Of course I was able to boot Win XP after I disconnected USB hard drive and restarted. But now even with USB hard drive disconnected I just couldn't boot Linux. Just to clarify, you don't boot from the installation cd to Fedora, you just start the installation process. Rescue mode, however, will try to find your installation. But remember the above comments that I made about the usb modules being loaded from the installation cd? Grub is probably installed on a /boot partition on the usb drive. It is most likely not set active, so booting fails. Your Master Boot Record must be intact on your hard drive, as Windows boots with the usb drive disconnected. Of course, you can't boot Fedora with the drive disconnected, as all your Fedora OS files are on the usb drive, including the reference files for Grub. If you disconnect the drive, then Fedora will not boot or be found.

OK, originally you noted that you installed Windows on the Secondary Master; Quote: then this time i install a windows xp in a 40gb Secondary Master. So, if Windows is on the primary slave, things are a bit different. Sounds like you mapped correctly. Now, try the following; In a console window, as root user, type; grub-install --recheck /dev/hdd After that you will want to change your /boot/grub/grub.conf to this: title Win2k map (hd0) (hd1) map (hd1) (hd0) rootnoverify (hd1,0) chainloader +1 Make sure your bios boot order is where it was originally before you do this, assuming that grub is installed to the Master Boot Record of the Fedora drive.

Let me refer you to this how-to article which should help. Asking how to install Fedora is beyond the scope of this forum, but the references that I gave you should help. However, have you determined if your system hardwate supports Fedora? Posting some system specifications would help. Make and model of the computer that you are installing to and how much ram is in the system? There are also some great resources out there, such as the Unofficial Fedora Wiki and also the Fedora Installation Guide. But, you need to start out with a plan. Give us some more information to go on and what you are looking to do specifically and we will try to guide you. What is your internet connection; broadband, modem, DSL? Make sure that your hardware and such is compatible with Fedora, so you can assure a good experience. We will go one step at a time.

We need more information. This sounds like a modem connect issue. Which light is flashing? There are several on the modem. Each indicates a feature or diagnostic note. Did you try consulting the users manual or your service provider? What Linux product are you using and what version? From the users manual; Possible Solutions ! Check that the power cord is properly plugged into the wall outlet and the rear panel of the SB4200. ! Check that the electrical outlet is working. ! If the Standby LED is on, the cable modem is in Standby mode. Press the Standby button to reconnect Internet service. ! Press the Reset button. ! Call your service provider.

Try passing the noapic command at the main install screen. If that does not work, then consider a problem with the cdrom drive, or media. Is the media free from any noticable defects? Also, what was the install drive partitioned as before you attempted the initial installation?

Quote: I tried to install to my system with win xp already running but it says cannot find partition or smthing like that. Well what did it exactly say? That it could not find a valid partition to install to? If you plan on installing Fedora on a system that already has another distro on it, then you need to make a fresh partition for Fedora. Quote: but I want to know if I should leave the first partition and install xp to the second so fedora can install its boot sector on the first partition? Will this work? Again, what is exactly on the system now? If you plan just to have XP and Fedora on the system, just install XP. Then Fedora. You can either leave the rest of the hard disk space free, allow Fedora to use free space on the XP partition (where it would create it's own partitions on either free space or available space on the XP partition), or partition ahead of time with a utlity like PartitionMagic. If the latter option, you use "expert mode" partitioning and point Fedora to the pre-formatted partition. Windows wants to be first. Doing otherwise may confuse things and result in grub not booting Windows properly. Some advocate making a 100 mb boot partition on the drive first, a second for Windows, then a third for Linux. this can work as well, as long as you install XP first. The 100 mg boot partition acts as your boot partition. Just make sure that you install grub on that partition, if you choose this method. Take care. If you have a Dell, Compaq or HP laptop and XP was pre-installed, these systems often have a hidden partition on the drive first, that holds recovery data. Let us know exactly what you have, so we can advise you better.

This is a very standard system and it should work. This kind of error can be from a number of issues. 1. A funky cdrom drive -Sometimes the only way to check this is to try the disks on another system or different cdrom drive to see if the error repeats. We have seen this issue on Dell systems with older cdrom drives, but this does not seem to be the case here? 2. A need to change a bios setting Look at the Mandrake documentation here and set your bios to PNP OS=off. If this is not the problem, try adding the command pci=noacpi to the command line at the initial installation window during the installation. 3. Faulty installation disks Did you actually buy these disks from Mandriva or a third pary vendor that burns cheap cdrom disks? Look at the disks for scratches and marks that could cause issues. The bottom of the disks should be clean and free from scratchs or marks. 4. Other issues I have seen some issues with systems with ram over 1 gig in the system. This is solved by using the newer releases of Mandriva that supports large amount of ram better. You may want to try Mandriva 2006, since this is a newer version and may support your newer hardware better. **How is the drive partitioned that you are attempting to install to? What tool did you use to partition the drive in question? I'm curious about this, since you note that the error happened during this phase of the installation. A drive needs to be formatted in some way for Mandriva to see it properly.

We still need to know what revision card this is, A or B. This will determine what method to use to get the card up. One is a Marvell chipset, the other is Atheros. If you don't know where to look, refer to the previous link that I gave to the D-Link webpage and note the revision number for your card. I assume that you know your security settings (WEP or WPA keys) and your essid to the router? If it is a revision B, the Atheros chipset model, then look at this previous post about the 11th post down, which gives a good description of what to do. It is the first post from dleon.

Change your grub entires to; root (hd1,2) kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb3 initrd /initrd boot As long as you are sure that you created your symlinks correctly. How did you check where the root directory was? It would have also been helpful to know what the error message was that you received during the installation phase. Once you get into Fedora, please post your /boot/grub/device.map content. What computer system (make and model) are you installing Fedora onto?

Can you post the system make and model computer that you are using? Also, how much ram is in the system?

Could we have a little more information first? What exact card, make model and revision do you have? For example, DWL-650 revision b. If you need to, consult the D-Link support page to properly identify your card and revision number. This will help us determine what exact chipset is on the card, as they can vary even with the same model number. Is this a desktop system or laptop that you are using? Make and model of your system, please.

Quote: This is a Compaq Presario 900US with Mobile AMD ATHLON XP 1500+ 1.33ghz(which fluctuattes for some damn reason. just a second ago it was 662 mhz and now its 1.33 ghz, but im sure its supposed to be always in the 1.3 ghz area.), 240 mb RAM which I could have sworn was at least 300. but for some reason i think its fluctuating just like the mhz (662) number. Don't worry about the numbers fluctuating, it really does not mean much. This system comes with 256 mb of ram, unless you bought it with more installed. The video card in laptops often borrow some ram for it's functioning. Also, the free ram does fluctuate, based on how much is being used to run programs and background applications. I looked at your system specifications, which should be OK. The only possible issue is that you probably have just enough ram to run Mandrake in graphical mode. It sounds like you have broadband connected to an ethernet card to the laptop. This is fine. DSL, most likely would require you to have a user name and password and be connected to the router via a regular phone cable, not the coaxial cable you speak of attached to the router. Make sure that you burn the iso images correctly. See my article about this. NTFS is the filesystem that Windows uses. Your drive is formatted as NTFS, Mandrake 10 can have fits about reading files on such a partition for an installation. Since you are burning iso images to cdrom disks, this is not an issue. IDE means the internal hard drive that is in your system. In order to boot Mandrake, you need a bootloader, which is grub by default. This is the most commonly used Linux bootloader and is by default in Mandrake. During the installation, Grub can be installed on your internal hard drive (IDE) or in some cases, to the external drive. BUT, if to the external hard drive, it must always be connected to the system, if you install grub to the MBR, or Master Boot Record of the ide drive. If you install grub to the MBR of the external drive, and can boot from an external usb drive (this is highly dependent on your bios on the laptop), it may work. I don't recommend installing to the external hard drive, unless you know what you are doing and know how to boot from usb drive, if your system supports this. Mandrake is designed to be installed to the hard drive. it will take some free space from the internal drive to do this. So, dual booting, means that Grub will give you the option of booting either into Windows, or Mandrake. The other problem is that Compaq systems have specific partitioning setups that are made on the hard drive that sometimes cause issues. Unless you have full recovery disks for your system and hopefully a full cdrom of Windows, I suggest that you consider a "Live CD" version of Linux. This allows whatever version of Linux to run right from the cdrom disk, not touching the hard drive. I mention this, as this forum has quite a few posts about Compaq and HP systems that users have messed up. Many times the full cd sets are not included with these systems, which they should be. This makes recovery a hassle, especially if you have critical information or programs on the internal hard drive. There are a buch of Live CD versions of Linux out there, including MandrakeLive. You might consider one of these to become comfortable with using Linux first and see if you like it. Other versions of live cd Linux distros are Knoppix, Mepis and Puppy Linux, to give a few examples. To get an idea what is out there, see the Distrowtach web page

Take a look at this bug report. Also read this article which should help.

You can't have it both ways! For a new user to Linux, why not buy or burn a cd disk set? This will give you easy access to all you need. The cdrom disks can be had cheap here which will easily solve your issues. I don't recommend the method that you are trying now, as you will just get frustrated. The cdrom.img is only good for starting the installation. You still need either a driver disk to load the modules (drivers) for the external drive, or a cdrom set of Mandrake to complete the installation. The floppy boot disk only get's you as far as getting to the cdrom drive (cd set of Mandrake) or the internal hard drive. It's best suited for folks that for some reason (bios limitations) can't boot off a cdrom drive. The floppy boot image only has the bare minimum, due to the small space on these medium. This is not a full install boot image, which is about 8 mb and fits on a cdrom. So, the main problem is that the correct drivers are not present on the floppy to start an installation on your system. I'm a little confused by your post what is what, but it looks like you are installing from a laptop? Have you checked to see if all your hardware will work with Mandrake 10? Or would Mandriva 2006 be more appropriate? Most folks want to connect to the internet, so what is your internet connection? What method are you using to connect to the internet, cable, DSL, modem? Some laptops, like Sony, can be an issue and need special install instructions. Best to have a good plan before doing the installation. Post your exact make and model of laptop and we can take a look. Also, how much ram is in the system? If you have just a modem connection, then make sure that your modem is supported. Many in laptops are "winmodems" and may or may not work in Mandrake out of the box. Quote: My goal is to install Linux Mandrake 10.0 (dual boot i guess so i can keep windows but windows will be on my internal drive which it is now) on my Seagate 200gb internal harddrive which is encased in an enclosure(making it now an external drive) which is connected to my laptop via USB and THAT the drive is formatted and i believe PARTITIONED from what Ive seen in "Admin Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management - E:\ "layout -Partitioned" "File System - NTFS" "Status - Healthy and Active" So, the Seagate drive, which holds the rar files, is external usb? This will not work with just the floppy, as drivers need to be loaded for usb, so that the drive will be seen. Also, the drive is NTFS, which will not work (unless you really know what you are doing) for an installation. I have never used rar files, just ISO, so I don't know if Mandrake will see them as valid Mandrake archived files. I believe that ISO files are needed for this. Unless, of course, you found an article on how to do this. If so, please post a link to the site or source. The files do not need to be extracted, if you boot off the boot cdrom image (the larger cdrom boot image, burned to a cdrom disk). Mandrake will ask you where your files are located and read the iso images. Not sure about rar files, but if you have a link, this would help. But, consider my recommendation about buying a cdrom set, if your hardware is supported.

As I said above; Quote: You can fix the MBR via the Windows recovery utility, but this will erase the grub references in the MBR and being able to boot into SuSE is lost. So now, you need to decide what method to install SuSE and be able to boot it. If you don't install a bootloader (grub) you need a way to boot into SuSE. by not installing a bootloader, you assume that you will use another method to boot into Linux (that you have a plan how to do this), such as the small install, as I mentioned, on the internel hard drive, install grub in the MBR. You can then add the removable drive to grub, after making a few changes to the /boot/grub/device.map file and menu.lst files for the removable drive. Grub will then allow you to boot into Windows and the small hard drive install, where you can make the changes that you need anytime. Before you go any farther (do any further changes), boot Suse in rescue mode and make note of the /boot/grub files (menu.lst and device. map) and write down the values that they show for the removable drive and then you can add them to your small hard drive install of Grub, in the /boot/grub directory. The removable drive will probably show in the device.map file as something like; (hd1) /dev/sda Make note of that and the total entry for Suse in the menu/lst file (the first entries that you will see in that file) such as; title Suse whatever kernel (hd...)/boot....... initrd (hd...)/boot.... These can be added to boot SuSE off the removable drive.

look at the Ubuntu wiki ATI page for more information. This should help.

Has anybody contacted Compuapps and ask them about what products are supported? It's interesting, their forums have no messages in the last two years on their OnBelay product, or the datarecall package. Looking at the Linux distros supported, it seems that old versions of Mandrake and RedHat were supported, so I bet the latest distros won't work, based on what the compilers were used to make the packages and qt versions were supported at the time.

Originally posted by xZeler8: Quote: ok, when installing i chose the MBR (i've done this many many times now) but for some reason it looks like it's installing to the boot partition regardless...i can try to install again and see if it works and if not then how do i set the boot partition active... Do you mean that you keep installing grub, or the whole installation of Fedora? Let's stop doing this and look at the problem as it stands now. What do you mean by grub seems to be installing in the boot partition regardless? Do you mean a seperate /boot partition on the Fedora drive, or the /boot directory within Fedora? If the latter, some of grub's files are normally installed here. Did you do a reinstall of Fedora after you switched the drive designations (I assume in the bios?). This might explain a few things. Please do not do this, as then you have the possibility of the grub main bootloader in multiple locations on your hard drives. If you reinstalled Fedora after changing the bootloader, then you have one oin the original MBR on sda and another on the MBR of the sdc drive. The MBR is always the first boot drive designation in the bios. So, if you switch the drive designation to sdc to boot first, then install to the MBR.... unless you designate specifically were grub is to be installed during an installation. Quote: also, since my last post i changed my 3rd hd to the first boot drive...it found grub and loads windows, but when i try to select fedora (2 fedora options) it says unknow format or unknown device configuration or something like that, i will try again tonight to check on that Quote: you said earlier that sata setups are different, is that correct? all 3 of my hd's are sata with the only other devices being my cd drives which are both ide, does this matter? What I mean by this is that Linux sees the drives differently. On ide drives, the designation is usually hda. hdb etc... On sata drives, it is usually sda, sdb... Also, sata does not designation primary master , primary slave etc...rather the order that the cables are connected to the mainboard for each sata drive. So, the first sata connector on the motherboard is sda, the second sdb... The cdrom drives and other ide devices have no effect on this, as they are assigned the same way as any other ide drive, hdc....depending on what connectors they are attached to and jumpered for.

Can you post what distro and version of Linux that you are using? Most likely, this package was compiled using a different much version of qt that you have. Can you also post a link to where you got the datarecall-linux.tar package. I bet it is an old package and you are using a newer distro and version of Linux?