danleff

Actually, I do have a couple of other ideas. Do you know the exact make and model hard drives that are on the system? If so, post the make and model of the master drive in the system. It may be a jumper setting... If you are absolutely sure that the jumpers are set correctly to master and slave on the drives and that none are set to cable select. If your master hard drive has a setting for single drive only and you plan to just keep the master drive in the system, this could be an issue. With only one drive in the system, the jumper may need to be set differently. Go into the bios and see if the drives are detected correctly as master and slave. while there, see if the bios is set to "auto" to detect the master drive, or is it set to "LBA." Did you do a full takeover install of Fedora on the slave drive, or did you partition the drive to make room for Fedora, leaving the first partition as, say fat32? Did the slave drive once have Windows installed on it? Make sure that the windows boot.ini drive is resident on the master drive. Click on My Computer...choose tools--> folder options--> view and click to show hidden files. Then go to the c drive and see if the boot.ini file is located in the root of c.

I have just been looking around. See if your grub.conf file is in the /etc/ directory. If it is at /etc/grub.conf, then post the contents, if you can.

Quote: So I decided to take the help of the online experts and in the process did a few things to load grub on my first (hd0,0). Now when I rebooted the grub screen appears but now I cant choose neither of my OS's. Grub keeps re appearing even after chossing the OS. It depends on what you did to install grub to what you thought was the MBR. My guess is that you did grub-install /dev/hda1. It should have been grub-install /dev/hda. When installing Fedora, just allow grub to be written to the MBR. This should set things up to boot either OS, unless you have a weird partitioning scheme on the first hard drive. What system are you using? Is it a Dell or Gateway computer by any chance?

It sounds like the MBR was written to the slave disk. Look at this Microsoft article. Follow the directions to right click on My Computer-->Properties-->click the Advanced tab, choose Settings under Startup and Recovery. Under System Startup, click Edit. Look at the boot.ini file and see if it says something like; [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect Under default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS Does it say multi(0)disk(0) or disk(1)? make special note of the setting under operating systems. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows Does it say disk(0) or disk(1)?

What error(s) are you getting trying to boot the system w/o the secondary drive installed? You are sure that the drives are jumpered and cabled correctly? By chance, you did not change the boot order in the bios at some point for the hard drives, so that the first hard disk boot device is hdd1 rather than hdd0?

The kernel panic is occuring during the installation? If so, you burned the disk incorrectly, or possibly the downloaded image is bad. Did you download the image via modem or broadband? What speed did you burn the image at? If faster than 4X, try burning the image at 4X. The mistake that many do is to burn ISO images at the top speed of the cdrw drive. ISO images need to be burned slow, When you say "old" pc, give some system specs. on the system that you put together. Include the CPU, amount of RAM in the system and the size of the hard drive. If you know the speed rating of the cdrom drive, post that also. Some of these old computer's cdrom drives don't like home burned disks. Try using cd-r media, if you already did not.

Can you post your /etc/fstab file contents? What commands did you try to manually mount the drive? something like... mount -t vfat /dev/<location of drive>... ...and the portable disk device is USB?

In the /boot/grub directory, do you have a grub.conf file? If so, can you post the contents? I assume that you saw the RedHat guide here? If not, and I am going by remote memory, try typing on as root user; redhat-config-boot See if this package is installed. If it is not, try installing it off the cd. If it is installed, you should be able to install grub to a floppy.

Let's start with the basics first. Is the your bios set to boot from the floppy drive as the first boot device?

I don't know much about scsi drives, but can you post your menu.lst file? It looks like the grub changes got written to the ide drive?

Are you an administrator on this system? While in Windows, go to start-->Control panel-->User Accounts. Does it show your name as administrator? If so, click your account-->create a password. Also, for reference, see this link.

Originally posted by iamroot: Quote: Urm. Pardon me for saying this but what makes Debian so good? I like Debian for it's Free Software guidelines and their non-commercial approach but in what way is it better than other distros like Fedora? hehe...as one becomes experienced with Linux, you appreciate the stability of Debian. To borrow from a movie quote; With stability, comes great flexability. A lot of good distros are based on Debian...Linspire and Knoppix are just two examples. Debian takes their time with releases, which results in a very stable product. I like the ability to fully customize my installation and add packages easily, as I need them (apt-get). Most users want a lot of features that work out of the box. They also want the latest, which is not always the best. Eventually, they want to tinker and add something to their installation. Hence, a good deal of posts here are related to users trying to customize their Mandrake or Fedora installations. While frequent releases do provide more timely improvement in hardware compatibility and sometimes user friendliness, the expectation is that every piece of hardware out there should work. My systems are not exotic, so Debian works well. The more that distros try to customize their products to be more user friendly, the less flexability and choice seems to be a result, with complex fixes being needed. A lot of good folks here spend hours finding and developing these fixes, which is why we are all here.

Click on the related links topic under these posts "Want to uninstall RedHat 9." Look at shobhit's post, which describes the process of restoring your Windows MBR and removing Fedora throgh Windows. Just in case, the link is here.

How about this link. You may also be interested in the main page offerings here.

Have not done this in a while. Wilhelmus, do you still have to change to init 3 to do the install? Given the licensing problems with NVIDIA, most distros don't include the drivers as part of the install process. You have to do it after the installation. Hmm... maybe I'll give it a go in Debian. I just figured out how to install Debian 3.1r0a on the sata drive in my box with kernel 2.6.11. I'm working on a how-to article. Speeds things up quite a bit when compared to regular IDE drives that I have. I keep coming back to Debian. The new release is great!

Yep! I was trying to remember the key sequences for unmuting alsamixer. I have not done it for a while. Nice going! I really have to update my sound soon. I will look at this card and give it a go. You made the right decision. Onboard sound just does not cut it sometimes.

Yes, some systems with newer cards can give fits. mcfester, BTW, nice system! As egorgry said, either Mandrake is not detecting the video card correctly, the monitor rates are off, or you missed setting up video during the installation. This is common, as when you get the hardware configure screen during the install, making sure that you configure the video is easily missed. At the summary screen, if you noticed, you may have seen that the video was marked as not configured yet. Look at the specifications for your monitor. When you set up xorg, you may need to manually specify the horizontal and vertical rates. If this fails, you may have to revert to vesa to get the GUI up. Then you can tackle more specific settings for your video card later.

To give credit where credit is due.... DapperDan has two that he knows work in Linux. See this thread. I have a Diamond SupraExpress 56k serial modem that worked when I used it. Just make sure that if you find this one, it is the PC version and not the Mac version. If you buy one from a local computer store, other than those noted, ask if it is compatible with Linux. That way, if it is not, you can return it if it does not work.

First of all, RedHat 9 is an older distro. The modems that will work "out of the box" are fewer than Fedora, the newer version of RedHat. I would suggest Fedora Core 3 or 4. Since you are using Windows XP, I assume your computer can handle it ok. Is your system a desktop or laptop computer? make and model? What modem do you currently have? The best way to get a modem working is to get an external Modem, which controls modem functions alone, a "hard modem." Most PCI modems are "winmodems" designed to work with Windows and which rely on the CPU for many functions, rather than being a true "hard modem - controlling functions without relying on the CPU. A good book to start is Linux for Dummies. Don't be offended, it is really a good start. You can usually find good RedHat books at say barnes and Noble, or other large bookstores. Most of the stock they have is outdated, but chances are that a RedHat 9 book will be there.

If you just got a return to the prompt, the drivers loaded correctly. They are already built into the kernel. I wonder if the volume is turned down or muted. Try going into the terminal as root user and typing in alsamixer. You should get the mixer window. If it shows, try turning up the volume by clicking the mouse above each graphic bar, so that the volumes are up all the way. If alsamixer does not come up. let us know. if you are using kDE, also try looking at kmix. usually at start-->Multimedia-->kmix. Or type in kmix at the command prompt. Does the speaker icon show at the bottom right of the task bar? If you double-click the icon, does the mixer window come up and show a mixer window with volume bars?

See your other post, that has some replies.

Is this a desktop or laptop? Make and model? When you try typing in startx in the terminal, let us know what error messages that you get (if the GUI does not come up), like "no screens found."

Hmmm... Quote: VENDOR: Creative Model: Labs SB Audigy LS Module: snd-ca0106 So, this is the apparent sound module that should be used. Take a look here at the alsa directions. This is what the alsa matrix says for the SB0410 Try this as root user; modprobe snd-ca0106;modprobe snd-pcm-oss;modprobe snd-mixer-oss;modprobe snd-seq-oss ..all on one command string.

I installed Fedora Core 4 test 3 on my box a month back, no problems. Just this morning, i tried the full release of Core 4 and it choked on my second hard drive partitioning scheme and bombed out, stating that hdb5 (one of the partitions on the drive) was busy. It is a reiserfs partition install of SuSE. I'm trying to decide if I want to wipe the drive and start over. It's interesting that the test version installed with no problems. Nothing has changed on the hard drive.

If you have USB 2.0 compliant USB ports in your box, it should be no problem.