danleff

patonr, give us a little more information on what you have. KDE is on disk 1 of the Mandrake install disk. During the install, did you have three disks of Mandrake? Do you have a graphical environment now, or command line? It would be best to use the install disks and install KDE from them, since this will automatically install the KDE packages and dependencies in the correct order.

There should not be. I use one on my systems with no problems. KVM switches use PS/2 ports, so you need a PS/2 mouse and keyboard.

Can you give a little more information on your system? What make/model of computer do you have? Or if this is a self built system, what hardware is in the system? Sound card...hard drive (ide or sata) and modem make and model number. How did you do the install of Suse? Did you tell it to take over the entire hard drive, or use free space from the XP partition during the install, or, partition space at the end of the hard drive for Suse ahead of time? When you boot the system, do you get a choice to boot XP, or just Suse? And most importantly, do you have the XP install cd disk that came with the system?

Pcmcia and usb are two different animals. The Buffalo card has a prism chipset, or at least it should. Did you follow the advice on the ndiswrapper card wiki page? Also, did you install the Win XP driver using the ndiswrapper -i command? One user reports that the driver for Linksys WUSB54G works fine.

You really don't need any filesystem type, depending on what type of install that you are using. mandrake will install on un-partitioned space, or takeover an already formatted partition, of your choice. The only issue is that in automated partiton install choice, it likes to use the last detected partition or free space on the drive. Mandrake 10.1 is not beta, Mandrake 10.2 is in beta. What problem are you having with the cd that you are using? Give some specifics and we will try to help.

Yep, from what I remember, the utility comes up on locally on your web browser, but needs a confirmation (temporary) license key which is verified over the net from their web site to your box. You can try to e-mail them and ask them if there is a workaround.

You right. The fstab file is auto-generated at start. Lindows does this as well. I do not know how to disable this in Mepis, but I believe that we have a Mepis expert here on the boards. Now who was it....? Hopefully this will prompt a reply.

Thanks, shobhit, for posting the answer. I've been a little busy and did not get back quickly. ...and sasfmj , nice work! 8)

I just finished an article on Linux and the RT2500 chipset wireless cards. I had all kinds of issues with ndiswrapper and my linksys card drivers. I ended up using the Ralink drivers from Sourceforge in my Slackware and Suse installs. They work fine. If rbutler gives his permission, I will use his suggestion in my article. nwalthall, what driver (and where did you get it) for the ndiswrapper install? Remember, you also should use the XP driver, or at the least, the Win 2000 driver. The "combo" driver (for all versions of Windows) do not work well.

The Linuxant driver may work, but in the end, it will cost you $20.00 USD to get the license, once you find that it works, just so you are aware. To show you how difficult it is with this card, see this thread. I do not believe that Fedora has a driver for this card yet, at least not on their up2date pages. The other option is the Atmel Driver. I aways hate to share these articles with folks, as usb adapters are still a work in progress and very frustrating, such as in this reader's post on the Fedora Forum.

I recommend not installing Mandrake 10 (not 10.1) next to or on top of an already existing NTFS partition, if that is what you made. There was a problem with the kernel 2.6 series and Fedora Core 1 and Mandrake 10 using the install formatting utilities. This problem was resolved in Fedora Core 2 and Mandrake 10.1. Fat32 should be OK, if you already formatted the space with this filesystem type. Either leave the space unfomatted that you plan to use for Mandrake and allow Mandrake to claim the space for an install, or use PartitionMagic and make an ext3 partition with the space. The other option would be to grab a copy of Mepis to format the space, using that distro's qtparted partitioning utility, then install Mandrake.

Also, take a look at the ATI Linux faq page.

Don't worry about the dev/sda1 just yet. Are you using Grub or Lilo as your bootloader?

DOS fdisk does not recognize Linux partitions. DO NOT attempt to just reformat the partition. First, we need to know a few things. If Lilo or Grub is installed, you need to remove it from the Master Boot Record first. 1. Do you have your Windows XP installation disk? 2. Do you have your RedHat installation disk? 3. Do you have access to PartitionMagic? The article here will explain a few things, but do not use the /fdisk /mbr command yet until we know what disks and software that you have. Just to check, are you using Grub or Lilo as your lootloader?

If this does not work, let me know. I just had the same issue on a Slackware install. It was on a 2.4.26 kernel, but most likely you may need to edit the fstab file to point to the dvd drive correctly.

Quote: I then try to boot up using fc3 disk1 again on my usb cdrom and choose to upgrade the fc3 and ensure the grub settings are correct. When I reach this stage, it always tells me "no boot loader installed" and suggest to me to reinstall boot loader After upgrading fc3, it shows error msg "No kernel packages were installed on your system. Your boot loader configuration will not be changed" Now, i'm stuck in a pc that cannot boot from my harddisk. Unlike windowdependent, I would very much like to go back to my previous winxp pro cos there are tons of settings and software installed there although no critical data files. OK, I guess that I misunderstood. I thought that you just wanted to get back to your Win XP install. I re-read your post and see a couple of issues. Fedora will not boot now (doesn't show) because you wrote over the MBR with the windows bootloader. Your "upgrade" was not really an upgrade, since you already had FC3 on the system. Therefore, no kernel packages were installed, as the message said, because they were already there. Grub was not updated, because no changes in the kernel were made. PartitionMagic fails with the 117 error code because it can't read the partition table properly. If you attempted to install Fedora over the debian install, this could be the issue. You should always reformat the linux partition when trying a new distro to completely clear the partition. When you change distros, you need to consider what you are doing for a bootloader and where it was located and remove it if necessary. So, /dev/hda3 is corrupt is my guess, from multiple installs. I also bet Debian was using lilo on the MBR? If you did not uninstall lilo (on the MBR) it was still there. You installed Fedora and installed grub to the root partiton. Ignore the article that you posted about, as it is for Redhat 7.2, not Fedora. Things have changed. If you feel like trying again, there are a couple of things to do. You can try to recover Fedora as it is, but I would start over, given the partition issue. PartitionMagic doesn't always like how Fedora marks partitions, which is why you should use one partitioning technique, PartitionMagic or the Fedora utility to make your FC3 partition(s). What I would do, is do a re-install (not upgrade) of Fedora, if you want to keep trying it. When you get to the partitoning utility, tell it to use and format /dev/hda3 (your linux partition) for Fedora. Here is where you have two options. When choosing the bootloader, you can install a bootloader onto a floppy, instead of the hard drive. This way your system is not affected by grub, when you want to boot from Fedora, use the floppy, until you are comfortable with the install and navigating Fedora. You can always install the grub bootloader again from within Fedora, if you wish. Or, allow Fedora to install grub on the MBR during the install. It will set up grub properly to boot either Windows and Fedora. In past versions of Redhat, some suggested not installing grub to the MBR. However, Fedora should handle this fine. Do not install all of the packages in Fedora, there is no need for this. Accept the default install selection for packages to install. If you need more later, you can always add then from withing Fedora. This should take a lot less time.

If you have your Windows XP install disk, pop your Windows XP CD in your CD drive and boot off of it. You will be asked if you want to install or use the recovery console. Choose the Recovery Console option and then enter the fixboot command and hit the enter key. Once that is completed, run fixmbr and allow the changes to take place. Reboot and see if XP's bootloader allows you to boot into Windows.

I don't know if this still applies, but look for a line in the xorg.conf file that says; load "glx" Make sure that there is no hash mark in front of it, so that it reads; load "glx" not; ########load "glx" See if that works.

Yep! drmagoo seems to be correct. I just checked the ndiswrapper page on supported adapters and that is what I find.

Nice work! ...and in the process, I learned something about sata and grub to boot. Thanks frankyb for the prompts (puns intended)!

No the problem is not booting from NTFS, it's the way sata is handled by the bios and if the bios is also set up to enable sata raid, as well. I need to think about this. The drive swap technique would work, I think, except for the issue, as noted in the reference that fousage made; Quote: Caution: This is effective only if DOS (or Windows) uses BIOS to access the swapped disks. If that OS uses a special driver for the disks, this probably won't work. Let me think about this some more. One more issue that I thought of. What does the file /boot/grub/device.map say the valid drives are on the system? Does it say that hd1 or hd2 is /dev/sda? BTW, what motherboard is this; or what system - HP or Compaq by any chance? This may give me a clue.

Hmm...I always thought that Mandrake made you pick a root password. I still am not clear on which you mean. Did you add a root password during the install? Are you referring to your user name and password? Are you saying that you did not add a user password, just a user name and no password? If you are speaking of logging in as user (and you did not specify a password on install), at the welcome screen, what happens when you put in your user name, without a password and tell Mandrake to start?

Since i don't have XP on sata, I am not sure, but try something like this... Remember, that grub sees the first partition on a master drive as (hd0,0). Linux will say that the drive is hda1. Grub starts with "0" and Linux starts the partition series as "1" So, if the drive is seen as sa1 by linux, then the proper entry might be (sa0,0) since grub uses "0" to see the first partition, not "1" Let's try this. Get into a console window and type in dmesg Scroll up until you see an entry for the drive. You can also go to the console as root uer and type in fdisk -l (that's the letter l, not the number 1) and see what the drive and partition structure looks like. Sometimes sata will be seen as hde, which is very much like using a raid connection for an ide drive. Let us know what you find out. I think that we are getting closer. but I admit my knowledge of sata is not good, so perhaps someone else has the proper answer right off.

No need to apoligize, you did nothing wrong. You did not hijack the thread. Your post explained your situation fine. Personally, I would leave the system alone, if it is functioning properly and you feel queasy about changing anything right now. To offset the delay of Win XP booting, just highlight it and hit the enter key. The 30 second boot delay will be be skipped. There is no delay, no countdown, and Windows will boot immediately. If you have already changed the previous install partition for RedHat and it is no longer there, the grub menu.lst file may not be there. There is nothing to change, in this case. If you boot a live cd and know where the partition is (say it is still there and the /boot/grub/menu.lst file is still present), then you can edit it to make changes, but not delete Grub from the master boot record itself, which resides on the first part of your master ide drive. The problem is that you don't have a Win XP cd disk to run the recovery of the MBR to Windows. In this case, you need to resort to more drastic measures, hence my post on the Win 98 boot disk and the the command line to try and re-write the MBR. Some report this works, some report that it fails. I believe this is due to the way the system was already set up. If this is an HP or Compaq system, I would leave it alone. these systems are a little tricky, as they often have recovery and bios related information on a small hidden partition at the beginning of the master hard drive. To get an idea of what we mean, do a search on Windows XP restore MBR and you will come across some examples of what I mean.

u_r_a_windroid, look again! Yes, the title of the thread, from 2 years ago (2002), was redhat 7.1, but codfish's post is recent (1/27/05). Codfish tagged this thread, but the original POST was not his! shobhit, good point. but, it is unclear if he can still access his linux install. I'm glad you pointed this out. You can change the delay to boot to anything that you want. When you are at the Grub boot screen just choose any entry and hit the enter key and this will override the delay, including the first entry.