danleff

Originally posted by sabbathpriest: Quote: Update: I've set the Hard Drives as Primary Master and Primary Slave now, and again set the BIOS to boot from the Slave Hard Drive first. That got me a "NTLDR IS MISSING" message. I tried to fix that by loading the safe mode in the BIOS, but that got me nowhere, after rebooting I would not get past the first screen and I could not get to BIOS. I cleared the BIOS and rebooted to windows XP, still no sign anywhere of my Fedora Core 4. I'm very confused now... OK, changing the hardware designation is not a good idea. The boot.ini file in Windows points to what drive Windows boots to. This is why you got the "NTLDR IS MISSING" error. I need to ask, is this a Dell or Gateway system? These systems are the bane of my existence on these forums. If not... Quote: 1) Installed slave Hard Drive for FC4 2) Installed FC4 successfully on Slave Hard Drive Good, so the drive is now set up with at least one partition so that Linux can see it. Quote: 3) Set Hard Drives as "Primary Master" and "Primary Slave" 4) Cleared BIOS and loaded default settings 5) On reboot I do not get the option to boot from FC4 or WinXP, the system boots directly to WinXP OK, so now you are booting into Windows. Do you remember how you set up Grub (the Fedora bootloader) to boot? From the MBR (Master Boot Record) or to a boot partition? If this is not a Dell or Gateway system, you should install Grub (during the installation) to the MBR of the primary master drive, which is now hda1. How one fixes this depends on your experience with Linux. Now that you have XP on the master and it is booting, I would suggest that you do a re-install of Fedora. The problem is that if grub was set up with the drives as secondary master and slave, grub and Fedora is pointing to these designations. The /etc/fstab file (tells grub where the root system is) will also be pointing to the secondary slave drive as the root of the system, which you do not want. Fixing this is possible, but takes some work, since you changed to primary master and slave. Is this correct?

I should have read your posts more carefully. You have a boot partition on hda2, so this is fine, sorry. I never use a boot partition, so this is a source of my own confusion. So, the root (hd0,2) line is correct, pointing to the hda3 boot partition. Your absolutely correct. By using linmux noprobe during the installation, you disable probing hardware, such as your network. Quote: linux noprobe Disables hardware probing for all devices, including network cards (NICs), graphics cards, and the monitor. Forces you to select devices from a list. You must know exactly which cards or chips the system uses when you use this command. Use when probing causes the installation to hang or otherwise fail. This command allows you to give arguments for each device driver you specify. . Taken from this site. Hence, the probable source of the problem. Fedora is hanging on hardware that you specified (or did not) during the installation. The problem with this type of installation, is that you need to know exactly what chipsets are in your NIC card (and other hardware) that you can set later. In some of these cases, you can hit <ctrl> <c> and let the boot process continue. But this issue here is Fedora does not like your machine. I can think of a few exotic answers, but I am not sure that you want to do this. What I suggest is to try the newest version of Mepis on live cd and see what it does. If it works, then you can install it on the hda5 partiion. As a last ditch effort, you can try this. At the grub screen, go once again to the edit mode and the kernel line. At the end of the kernel line type in; noapic Make sure that there is a space betwen the last entry already there and inserting this code. Hit the enter key, then "b" for boot and see what happens.

No, the installation is the same by typing in linux noapic as suggested. You are just telling the installer to ignore some bios values that may be complicating the installation. BTW, make sure that you defrag the Windows installation before you install Mandrake. This will make sure that any data files that may reside toward the end of the Windows partition are moved back toward the beginning of the partition. This will assure that when Mandrake makes room for it's installation there is less chance for data loss on the XP partition. I assume that you will tell Mandrake to use some of the Windows disk space for installation, or have you partitioned your sata drive already to make room for the Mandrake install?

Could you be a little more specific on what happened that lead to this problem? Installing Linux on a dual boot system? However, assuming the situation is the same, I found this thread that may be what your looking for.

Let me know if this works for you.

Quote: Maxtor 120 GB 6Y1209 Hard Drive (This one is the Slave drive, nothing is there)If you are wondering YES I've changed the jumper to make it the slave drive. Is this drive seen in Windows? Did you set up the drive with either partitioning software like PartitionMagic, or the Maxblast installation software? You need to have some sort of fat32 or Linux partition on the drive in order for FC4 to see the drive, just as in a Windows installation, a NTFS or Fat32 partition must on the drive for the Windows installer to see the drive.

So, the installation still fails by using either the linux noapic or text noapic variables? If so, I would try to install Mandrake 2005 Limited Edition. The support for your via sata may have improved since 10.1 was released. You could also try the latest version of Mepis of Knoppix from the live cd to see if the motherboard accepts one of these. If so, you can install any of them to the hard drive.

If you know how to edit Grub when the grub menu pops up (booting from the hard drive), change root (hd0,2) to root (hd0,4) See if that works. If this gets you in can edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file directly using Konqueror in superuser mode, to make the changes stick. Let us know if you don't know how to edit grub at the menu. Each distro does it somewhat differently, but basically when you get to the grub menu, try hitting the "e" key, highlight the root line, hit "e" again, then use the left arrow key until you get to the part to edit. Make the change and hit the <enter> key. Then hit the "b" key to boot with the changes. If hitting the "e" key does not give you the raw menu, hit the <esc> key, yes to text mode, then "e"....and so on. If this works, remember that you need to edit the file menu.lst directly to make it stick.

I have not used it for a while, but I seem to remember Ghost for Linux should do the job for you. I'll have to download the latest version and see what improvements have been made.

First of all, I would not install Windows 98 on this box. You are going to run into a bunch of issues, unless you know what your doing. If you do, ignore this comment! What is the ide drive jumpered as? Primary master.....? Where are you going to Install Mandrake? The ide or sata drive? For Mandrake, try the following; At the installation screen, press F1 for advanced options and typed in: linux noapic (hit the enter key) Or, text noapic (hit the enter key)

These Dell's have an Intell motherboard chipset, which seems to be giving FC4 fits. These Dells are designed to work with XP exclusively. There are a lot of posts about Dell systems on this forum and elsewhere. I would not install any distro of Linux on the same hard drive as the pre-installed XP one. Dell often puts a hidden recovery partition on the beginning of the hard drive. This often causes problems. You errors suggests a kernel panic?? which means that grub is looking for the kernel on the wrong partition. It looks like you have been able to get in FC4 to install grub to the MBR, probably via rescue mode from the cd? Get into FC4 and type the following at a console as root user; df -h (hit the enter key) Post what comes back as the root filesystem, usually the first entry that shows the root marker /. If possible, get into the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and post where grub is pointing to the kernel to boot. You will see an entry like; kernel (hd0,1) /boot/vmlinuz........ or an entry after the title; root (hd0,1) Post what either states for the bolded area that I noted. Good thing that XP still works. I hope that you have your recovery cds?

This is a problem with XP in general. Add any major piece of hardware that the OS or Office detects, and the assumption is that you are trying to use it on another system, Hence, you have a license only for one PC and Windows complains. With Linux, many problems with general functioning after an installation can be traced back to a faulty DVD or CD burn, as just one package that does not install correctly can cause one issue. ISO images need to be burned at a slow speed to prevent this to assure a valid proper burn of the iso. If Linux does not start right to the desktop GUI, but defaults to a console, then the problem is often hardware related, Mostl often it is a video conflict within X. Commonly the video card driver is not configured or recognized properly. Shutdown problems are often bios related. If your motherboard uses (or does not use) APM or ACPI power management. You see this a lot with laptops. In this case, You need to know what the motherboard uses and make an adjustment to the grub file to switch off ACPI, or force APM. Then the system will shut down cleanly. One workaround that often works is to turn off Plug-n_Play OS in the bios. Linux likes to handle things independent of the bios defaults.

I have never used Apache, but maybe this web page will help.

Did you set up the network during the installation? Are you using broadband? If you did not setup networking, you need to get into NASM. It should be on your desktop. There is a tutorial here. Make sure that you set up the card using DHCP. If you are asked about the card, or module, pick 8139too. If you have broadband and you ISP uses dynamic IP addressing, then ignore the questions about adding an IP address and such and just continue with the screen prompts. I don't remember how Vector does this, but if the NIC does not come up right off, then try rebooting and see if the network comes up.

If you got error messages with the 2nd cd, then most likely the cd was burned incorrectly. ISO images need to be burned at a slow speed, say 4X. Also, make sure that you burn them as an image, not data. See my burning iso article here. Once you have good burns, then try the installation again. Is this a total takeover installation of the system, or are you dual booting with Windows XP? In terms of the wifi, you need to be very specific. There are tons of cards out there, some supported easily, some not. Please post the make, model and revision of the wifi card. The revision is important, as even the same card with a different revision may have a specific chipset that it uses.

Or, use yum from the Dag Repository. Click on the link "Dag RPM Repository" to get to the main page and instructions. This should resolve any dependency problems.

yes, you can do this, but be careful not to reference the wrong vmlinuz, initrd or root= values files on boot. A better method would be to keep all these files in their respective locations (not move any) and alter grub as follows; If Knoppix is on hdb1 (hd1,0) and Mandrake is on hdb2 (hd1,1) title Knoppix root(hd1,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz "kernel no" root=/dev/hdb1 ro initrd /boot/initrd "kernel no" .img title Mandrake root(hd1,1) kernel /boot/vmlinuz "kernel no" root=/dev/hdb2 ro initrd /boot/initrd "kernel no".img This aviods any potential conflicts with like kernels (vmlinuz & initrd files) and booting to the incorrect root filesystem of each distro. It also keeps things neat and in order. Some distros will make a symlink to vmlinuz or initrd, so you want to minimize the chances of incorrect references being placed in grub. For this reason, you want to avoid adding any vmlinuz or initrd files to one single distro's /boot directory. Or if you have to do this, make a separate sub-directory in the /boot directory to keep these files apart.Then reference them in grub appropriately. For example; root (hd1,0) kernel /boot/knoppix/vmlinuz..... and; kernel /boot/whateverdistro/vmlinuz.... This will become apparent as you choose to upgrade to a new kernel version and add these values to your working grub. Remember, as you add each new distro, if you choose to allow the newer distro to overwrite the MBR, the new grub should detect and write entries for each proceding distro that it detects. If it fails to do so, you need to add any that are missing manually.

What version of Ubuntu are you running? XP will not see the second hard drive if it is formatted at a Linux partiition, as Windows is unable to see Linux volumes. Also, if Windows XP is on a NTFS filesystem, you probably can't save/write files from Ubuntu to an NTFS volume. generally NTFS read support should be available in the latest version, but safe write support is not perfected yet in most Linux distros.

Any idea what make/model of NIC/LAN card this is? If you type in lspci in a console window, do you see a reference to the card at all?

There are probably two entries in the XF86Config-4 file that controls the mouse, one for the 2.4 series kernel and one for the 2.6 kernel. The 2.6 series uses a different method of mouse detection. I found this Debian bug report about the issue. How to fix it? I'm not quite sure. Is this a PS/2 mouse, or a USB mouse?

If the partition is automounted, then you should get some readout like; filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda9 10088520 3612736 5963316 38% / In your case, if it is automounted, it should be /dev/hda2 (block size).......................... What does use% say? In my case, it's 38%. df -h should give you a more readable format, as well.

Something has changed in the system configuration. Did you by chance upgrade the kernel from 2.4 to 2.6, or do a system upgrade via apt-get or Synaptic?

OK, I may have a possible solution. Look at this VectorLinux installation how-to. What you are looking for specifically is section 4.4.

Take a look at the madwifi wiki article located here. This should get you going.

You can't really just copy files over to the system and you really need to allow formatting the drive for Linux by some method. You will need either a floppy drive or the ability to boot some sort of medium. Can you give some system specs. on this system? 1. The amount of memory on the system. 2. Make and model of video card. 3. Size of the hard drive. Mandrake, at least the newer versions, need at least 256 mb of ram. I'm not sure about Knoppix. With Vector Linux, I think you can get by (with an older version) with 32 mb of ram. The video card may be an issue, as it seems that it is not vesa compliant. There are distros that can do this. Most distros require an install of at least 1-2 gigs of hard drive space. It is possible to reduce this, but you have very limited functional ability. Puppy Linux may be a possibility, but it requires about 64 mb of ram. If you have enough hard drive space, you can use a swap file to fudge this. Some have installed it by placing the target system's hard drive in another system, do a hard drive installation, then put the drive back in the older system. But giving us some more information will help tell us if this is possible at all.