danleff

justbill has been having trouble booting from the cdrom drive. it looks like a hardware issue, or as you said, iamroot, a bios issue. He also had someone burn an iso for him of another distro, but it was unclear if the iso image was burned correctly. I also wanted to make sure that he is booting from an internal drive, not usb. See his other post here.

That's the point that I was trying to make, frankyb, the sata drive is not seen as (hd0,0), the first drive on an ide drive, but as something else. I was trying to get tomenglish2000 to look and see what it is seen as by Mandrake. Or am I mistaken?

Originally posted by nicevision2020: Quote: Hi Here is the response. #iwconfig lo no wireless extension eth0 no wireless extension sit0 no wireless extension no error when i used to build madwifi dirver rpmbuild --rebuild madwifi-0.0.20050125-1.src.rpm what i am doing wrong. martouf can answer this more correctly, but I don't think that you should be using the source rpm (src.rpm) of madwifi. It looks like the driver is not getting loaded and that the rpm is not setting up the basic needed config files and changes to modprobe.conf, that tells the system to load the module (driver) at boot. Navigate to /etc/modprobe.conf open it and see if: "alias ath0 ath_pci" Is on the list of commands to set up the module. Then look and see if there is a file called ifcfg-ath0 in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory. I won't hijack the answering the post from martouf, but this will give him more information to work on.

As martouf suggested, go into a terminal window and login as root user. Type in /sbin/iwconfig, hit the enter key and see if an entry comes up showing ath0, with some information. Or does it say; ath0...no wireless connection? You may only need to run iwconfig at the terminal..I can't remember which works in Fedora.

Your getting too many errors on install that are affecting KDM (the login manager) and the X server. You should not get these. I suspect a bad disk (even if they seemed to check ok) or a funky cdrom drive. What exact cdrom drive do you have? Are you having any other issues with data being read from the cdrom drive with oter disks? If you don't know, what speed cdrom is it? Older cdrom drives sometimes have trouble reading burned disks from an iso. Did you burn the disks yourself? What media are they on cdrw or cdr? Older cdrom disks sometimes have issues with cdrw burned disks. It could even be a scratch on the disk, or just that the disk is slowly going bad.

WOW! I'm not going to be much help here, but did I learn a lot about samba by reading your post. I have struggled with it for a while and default to LinNeigborhood to run things. I hope that you do not mind if I use your examples to set my systems up.

Very true. I always do a boot disk as the option for the bootloader, test the installation, then add it to lilo or grub if all goes well. If you have the hard drive space, this works well. I forgot to mention. If you use Partimage, you need to have a working distro to backup and recover from. I can't remember if it has a cdrom version, but I believe that there is one on the site. For most installed distros, the compression is fairly large, so that burning it to a dvd probably will be necessary. partimage will give you the final size of the gz or bz2 file that it creates, so you can judge this for yourself.

I just got a sata drive and am still scratching my head. Where did you tell grub to boot Windows from? Specifically, what was the drive designation, hda1, or otherwise? What I am interested in is where does Mandrake see the sata drive at? Hopefully I can learn something in the process as well. Sata drives should be seen as a designaton other than hda??? dependant on the sata hardware on the motherboard. This will help identify where to tell grub to boot from.

Did you mean that you did not add a root password, or normal user and password during the install?

First of all, if you think that FC3 is preventing a cdrom from booting, this is incorrect. This is a function of the bios, not FC3. I understand that you can't boot FC3 from the hard drive. Some more information is in order, in order to help. It is more likely that there is a problem with the cdrom recognition, if the bios is set to boot from cdrom and does not. You did save the settings in the bios when you exited after making the cdrom the first boot device? What system is this? Can you give a brand and model number? The hard drive...is it IDE or SATA? Is the cdrom drive an internel or external drive (ie; USB}? Wipe Drive. I assume that this is the retail version, since you are booting from a cdrom? It's not a demo version, is it? What is the OS that you are looking to install?

I'm not surprised that RedHat 9 did not work, especially if this is a newer laptop. Quote: Anyway, as I now only have Windows on the system, I no longer want to open up into Grub and then wait 30 seconds before the OS loads, so how do I delete the Grub Boot Loader? It looks like you no longer have RedHat 9 on your system? Did you delete the partition? If you did not, it would be relatively easy to remove grub, but you need to have an alternate plan. The amount of time that it takes Windows to load really has nothing to do with grub, which just points to windows on the hard drive. Anyway, you are in an interesting position. No Windows CD (I hate how laptop companies do this. You should have the Windows cd). The first thing that I would do is back-up and important data. The fix would be to restore the Master Boot Record. You can't see it and there are no files that you can remove. If you really insist that you want grub off the system, you can use a Windows 98 boot disk to restore the MBR to windows only. There is some risk that this will not work and make the system unbootable. So consider this carefully. Anyway, get a Windows 98 boot disk from bootdisk.com. Boot from the floppy and go to the c: drive. Type in fdisk /mbr and hit the enter key. Again, make sure that you back up your data first and that your system recovery cd disks are at hand. I hope that the recovery disks also restore Windows, if you need to re-install? If you don't know, consult your laptop manufacturer's web site or support before doing anything.

What about trying K3b? Is their a reason why you are trying from the command line? I assume that you are using cdrecord commands? Also, try running dmesg at a command line and scroll up and see what the drive seems to be recognized as during boot. What distro are you using?

Yes Linuxant does support some usb models, except, as per their web page; Quote: Note: Version 4 of the Linksys WUSB54G Wireless-G Network Adapter is currently not supported

Take a look at this thread and keep track of it, along with your curent post. Let's see what others can come up with and I will also look into support for this card.

For what it is worth, I got my Linksys WMP54Gv4 PCI card (Ralink) chipset working in Fedora Core 3 with the Ralink supported driver and in Suse with the package from Sourceforge.net. Prism based cards are also supported. The pci cards seem better supported than usb, depending what chiset is used. Different, sometimes even the same version of a card can have their manufactured chipsets changed midstream, which is interesting. There is other driver support from Linuxant for Atheros and some usb models. My laptop is working with an atheros chipset based D-Link card, using the Linuxant package and Win XP drivers. The same model and version may have different chipsets, depending when they were made. Look at the cd that came with your card to see what the chipset seems to be, based on the drivers included in the cd. As martouf noted, the WUSB54G is not supported at all, even with the Linuxant software using Win XP drivers. I am currently writing a how-to for my Ralink (Linksys) card and plan to have it up soon and will post the results. So, I guess there is some hope out there, as these issues are being actively worked on. I know this does not help those who currently have unsupported cards and usb models, but this points out the need to investigate what cards to use, if you are looking at wifi cards to use with a Linux system.

Yes, rather than blaming Fedora, look at what robstr12 said. If you mount the cd disk, open it, and just see the file with an .iso extension, your neighbor burned it incorrectly. If you see a bunch of directories and files, he probably burned it at too high a speed, or the download was faulty. ISO images need to be burned at a low speed, say 4X 0r 8X. Since you installed Fedora, you know that you have to boot the disk with cdrom as the first boot device in the bios. So, take a deep breath, look at the reason why the cdrom disk is not booting and talk to your neighbor. If you had any other OS in your system, the same thing would happen, if the cd disk was not burned properly, or you had a bad download.

Take a look at this article and see if it helps.

Two packages come to mind. Ghost 4 Linux and Partimage. Ghost 4 Linux works very well and I have used it with no problem. Partimage makes a compressed (bz2 or gz) image that you can save to your hard drive and restore to a like size partition, if you trash your distro. I have used this tool as well.

Do you have your Windows XP installation disk? If so, set the cd as the first boot option in the bios and do the following; Restoring the MBR of Windows XP Boot from the Windows XP CD and press the R key during the setup to start the recovery console. Select your Windows XP installation from the list and enter the administrator password. At the input prompt, enter the command FIXMBR and confirm with y when asked to do so. Then reboot the computer with exit.

Most likely your DSL modem is connected to a USB port on your system? What make and model is it? DSL over a direct USB connection is still very much in development in many cases. If you missed configuring the modem during the install (which is easy to do), or it did not configure properly, then this is an issue. If you have a NIC card in the system, you can try connecting the NIC card to the modem and run the network configuration tool. Linux loves NIC cards to connect to and most are compatible with Linux.

Any Soundblaster compatible card would be fine, among others. Just be careful about cheap Soundblaster Live cards over the internet. Many are legacy Dell or Gateway variety cards that do not work well and are designed, you guessed it, to work well only on Dell or Gateway systems using Windows. Most other inexpensive cards work reasonably well. Make sure they are compatible with any open slots that you have. Most retail boxed cards work well. If possible, don't use the same slot that the combo card was in, and yes, remove the old card. Check the HP site for your system to see if a setting has to be disabled in the bios for the combo card. I guess the main issue here is how are you connecting to the internet?

Now is the time to explore your system and do some reading. I suggest just getting used to Fedora and it's features first. If you are ready to dive into this, linuxquestions.org has started a wiki page to help folks learn about Linux. Another good site is the Help File Library at JustLinux You have a lot of aplications on your Fedora cd disks and Fedora will install them automatically for you. In this case, you do not need to worry about where to install applications to. This is done for you. If you have specific questions about installing certain packages (applications) let us know and we will guide you through the process. In terms of storing documents, that is up to you, to some degree. Most documents can be stored in your home directory, where you have permissions and easy access to. you can make sub-directories, as you wish to organize things. You home directory is located in /home/(whatever login user name you gave the system). For me, it is /home/danleff. You can open the file manager and it should open right into this directory. When you download from the web, this is a good place to point the downloads to.

There are a variety of ways to reformat the hard drive, which is what you seem to be saying that you want to do. But, before you do so, let's clarify what you really want to do. Are you looking to just remove Fedora from your system, or re-format the entire hard drive? Do you have Windows installed on the system as well? Do you have any other Linux distros on the system? If you just want to remove Fedora and keep Windows, you need to get the bootloader grub (or lilo) off the MBR first. Let us know what you want to do and we can guide you through the process.

I never laugh at HP systems. My Dad bought three of them. He uses Windows, so they work for him. The HP page notes that only Windows 98 is supported for this system. The audio, if you have original equipment, is an audio/modem combo card, a Conexant/Rockwell Chameleon combination. This system was built to run Windows only, so I expect you will have all kinds of issues with Linux and the audio and the modem, which is a softmodem (winmodem). I expect the keyboard will meet the same fate. Finally, if you have the original cdrom drive, an LG, don't try Mandrake 9.2 on your system. There is a hardware problem (actually a firmware issue)with these cdrom drives. using Mandrake 9.2 will trash the cdrom drive! I looked at my Suse 9.1 install. As I suspected, no drivers are there for the audio. Take a look at this site to get an idea of what your up against.

BSchindler is probably correct. The older Motorola cards were full hardware cards (ISA models), The newer ones softmodems. Intel has a few softmodems, as well. Any idea what the model numbers are? And, yes, an external modem would most likely work, since most are hard modems, with the chiset to drive the modem onboard. They can be had for as little as $20.00 USD.