danleff

Could you boot into Suse and get into /boot/grub and open the menu.lst file and post the output of Grub? We need to see what Grub is using as the boot drive. First, you need to decide on one thing to do. You can either use the Grub bootloader all the time, or the Windows bootloader all of the time. You need to decide which you want. I assume that you are changing the boot order in the bios to boot one or the other drive? I hope that you are not disconnecting drives and trying to boot that way?

The computer that you are attempting to install Mandrake to is a desktop? I'm going to guess that the system may be to old to run Mandrake 10.1, if you don't have an option to boot from cd. Of course there may be a bios update to fix the problem. Can you post the specs for the system, including how much ram is in the system (you will need at least 128 mb of RAM) and what the size of the hard drive is. Your cd is a specific "demo" version of Mandake (looks liks a euro build), so the normal Mandrake 10.1 floppy image will not work, as your cd has an altered version compared to the offical boot floppy disk. Is it possible to use another system with a cdrom to use rawrite and extract the image that cam with your cd? If you have no way to download mandrake and burn it to cd disks, I sugegst buying a set. They are cheap. See for an example, Linux Central. For $10 USD you can have a lot less headaches. But, you still need a system with a cd drive to do it.

Get into Mandrake and open a terminal window. Sign on as root user. Then type in; lilo -u /dev/hda (hit the enter key) Lilo should be removed and the original windows boot.ini (bootloader) restored. The is assuming that Lilo is on the Master Boot Record.

Two questions... Are either of these drives sata? What happens when you go into the bios and change the boot order from the first hard drive to the second? Change the first hard drive boot device from HD) to HD1, then boot the system? Does Windows come up?

1. Forget Qtparted. 2. Before you do anything, defrag the Windows partition. This will prevent any loss of data on the Windows drive. Windows has a habit of placing files near the end of the partition. 3. Defrag again to make sure. Look at the windows defrag utility to make sure that the chunks are all near the beginning of the partition. 4. Get PartitionMagic and resize the Windows partition, leaving empty space large enough for the install of Linux. Make sure that there is enough empty space for you needs. 5. Install Linux, telling it to use the empty space for the install. If you don't want to shell out the cash for PartitionMagic, there is a Windows program that is free that can do this for you. I am not using windows right now (surprise), but will be happy to look it up for you.

There is no missing file. either the cdrom drive is funky, or the disk is bad. The error is related to the cdrom drive being unable to read the disk properly at a certain point. Most likely a bad burn/disk, especially if it happens on more than one system (if you tried it on two computers and got the same error, or a like one). I would wait for the disk, or just buy a reliable set from another good source. If this is a good E-bay seller, he/she will refund your cash, or come through with a good disk, or set of disks.

Digikam is a nice frontend. There are others as well. It's nice to find these jewels is it not?

I'm glad egorgry asked this question. What version of Windows do you have on the system? Do you have a plan to boot the Linux install on the other machine? I assume that you want to retain Linux on the hard drive and use it on the other system? Also, what distro and version of Linux do you have on the hard drive?

My elcheapo card reader works. Linux assigns, as egorgry stated, the mount points as a removable drive. I made sue mine had CF first, which are my cards. SD works as well. Assignments when you read dmesg are usually sdb1. sdb2... ..and yes, this camera is fantastic!

Gphoto2 supports a wide range of cameras that do not allow direct mounting as a usb device. My Nikon 4300 just needs to be mounted as a usb device. This is the reason why it is not listed. On the other hand, my Kodak needs to use gphoto2 to download and edit photos right of the camera properly. Multi-card readers also generally work. The issue witrh some of them is that Linux, depending on what distro you are using, will want to read only the first slot on the reader. However, with a little work most of the slots will work when a card is inserted in the device on boot.

...and as egorgry asked, what hardware are you using to set the network connection up? The issue may not be needing to re-set everything from sratch, but you have not used the settings to make it happen at boot time. Is you system set up use DHCP? Does the ISP provider require that the IP is are dynamically asked for on boot, or is this a static setup? If you don't know, then most likely you did not tell Mandrake (in the configure my computer/network setting) to use DHCP at boot. This is how the script knows that it is OK to automatically get the IP settings and all from the ISP server when the system boots. If the current USB modem settings seem to work, set it up again and tell the utility to allow dhcp to get the settings at boot. It is a button that must be checked, as the menu guides you through the setup of the network. When it asks for any other special settings, just hit enter and allow the utility to proceed without entering any special values.

What I am saying, is that you are going to run into some snags with the hardware that you have and getting all these distros and Windows systems to boot. Issue #1 - sata. I think that I mentioned in a previous post that Suse 9.1 Pro failed to install on my sata drive. It refused to recognize the geometry correctly. Issue #2 - Each distro or OS is going to want to re-write the master boot record. Some Linux distros will ask you if it should do so, some won't. There is no sure way to know if each distro will allow/see the former one(s) that you install and give an option to boot each. You need to realize that each distro assumes that you are either using it alone, or in a dual boot configuration with one install of Windows. There are two bootloaders in Linux, lilo and grub. Some default to grub, some to lilo. Lindows 4.5 defaults to lilo, unless you have the beta release (are a Linspire insider and have access to the beta version), which uses grub. If you plan to use System Commander, there are instructions how to dual boot a number of distros, located here. I can't tell you off hand what will work on sata and what will not (except my experience with Suse Pro 9.1). My suggestion is to choose one distro and try it for a while, then make a decision where you want to go from there. Starting off right away with multiple distros on a system requires that you have some experience with how the bootloaders work, so you can iron out any boot issues that might arise. The more bootloaders/ distros that you add, the more complex the issues.

Two words of caution. Remember, XP will take over the mbr and over-write your existing grub or lilo bootloader, if you have it set up this way. Linspire is an excellent Linux distro. I have it running on two of my boxes. However, the install is automated and Linspire 4.5 will automatically install lilo (if you are installing version 4.5) on the MBR. It does not give you an option not to install lilo or not. So, you will be forced to use it's lilo. So, if you choose to try this, install it last. If you are comfortable with editing lilo, if you need to, this is fine. But, I caution you on this.

Buy yourself a belated X-Mas present. Try Learning Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora . It should also be available at your local Border's book store. Also, look at the Just Linux website. Another good book if you are using KDE as your desktop, is KDE for Linux for Dummies

There was a bug in the Mandrake partitioning utility and kernel 2.6 with the geometry of the hard drive. If you used the Mandrake partitioning utility to set up the partitions during the install, and had a NTFS filesystem using XP. This bug was apparently resolved in Mandrake 10.1. So, since XP always wants to be first, installing XP first, then installing Mandrake 10.1 would work easily. I think this is what ceejay949 was trying to avoid. If you have to use Mandrake 10 and XP, it is easier to install XP, use PartitionMagic (or another utilty) to make a fat32 partition after the NTFS partition (say to use for a data file to hold files needed to be accesses by both OS'), then install Mandrake 10. Grub or lilo will be able to boot both XP and Mandrake without a problem.

After reading the first post, I was afraid this would happen. How did you format your partitions? What utility did you use and be specific on what filesystems that you used for the partitions. Especially for the boot partition, what filesystem did you use...and did you elect to install grub to the master boot record? Finally, are you using and ide hard drive or sata?

Quote: i bought the mandrake linux 10.1 off of ebay for 3 dollars they are memorex cd-r i just reinstalled again using the text install method and the errors that i got before did not occur. and i got passed 73 percent and it was at like 80 percent on the second cd that there was one open office error and i skipped it and went on any way and it went to 86 percent and then it was like the installation just crashed for some reason. If they are not commercial cd disks, my guess is that the person who burned them did so incorrectly, or the cdrw is funky. What brand and model is it? I would move on any buy reliable disks from a vendor, which can be had for little cash. There are a variety of sites that you can buy from, such as Linux Central.

Try the fix suggested here. There is also a link to a more technical article, if you so wish. A Suse related article on the subject is here.

Dapper Dan make a good point. A little cash may save a lot of headaches. I think the issue is with the 2.6 kernel. These drivers were made originally for the 2.4 kernel series, from the description on the Ltmodem web page. You may also want to try the RPM build from this page, which is a link from the main page. Someone put this together for Fedora Core 2 installs. Make sure that you pick the ltmodem-kv_2.6.9_1.6_FC2-8.31a10-1.i686.rpm package, which is for Fedora Core 2 installs.

I concur, the install issue is probably due to a bad burn on the cd disks. vettebl71, I assumed that you burned these cd disks? What speed did you burn them at and what media did you use, cdrw disks or cdr disks? ISO images need to be burned at a slow rate, say 4X or 8X. CDRW disks can be troublesome when using them for iso images, especially if they are inexpensive disks, or not fully erased before burning an iso image. If they are erased using the "fast erase" feature, this is possibly an issue. If you bought the Mandrake cd disks, where did you get them? A little story to explain. Last week I was working with one of our techs re-imaging a new system that had a bad image on the machine. She burned six cd disks of the Ghost image on cdr @ 24X speed. You guessed it! When she tried to re-imaging the system with the burned disks, she got an error on each attempt from different cd disks on each try. The master cd disks worked fine. Not to be negative or discourage you, but I found this article about your system and installing Fedora Core 3. Just be aware that the same hardware issues may be present on the Mandrake install. If you are using broadband to connect to the internet, the Broadcom NIC card may give you a problem. Apparently the modem does not work either, probably it's a winmodem. It would be interesting to see if the author updates the page to tell if he got the modem or NIC card to work. However, if you just want to try Mandrake and play around with it, you should have no problem. I'm sure that there is a fix for the NIC issue, but it may take some work on your part. Or, Mandrake may do the job. Just so that your aware that everything may not work out-of-the-box.

One problem I see right off is that you probably don't have the kernel source package installed, as you get the following; Checking for kernel headers ... in /usr/src/linux: nope ... in /usr/src/kernel-headers-2.6.5-1.358smp: nope ... in /usr/src/linux-2.6.5: nope ... in /usr/src/linux-2.6.5-1.358smp: nope The main page notes that the kernel source needs to be installed on the system before the drivers will compile correctly.

Dan hit it right on the nose. Once the install screen comes up, just type in text and it will proceed without the graphical install interface. This uses less ram and should complete OK. Some words of advice on the laptop install. Do not allow Mandrake to overtake your total hard drive space on the install. Defrag Windows first before going any further with the HP and check back with us before actually doing the install. HP systems have a hidden recovery partition on the drive that you don't want to distub, especially if you plan to keep Windows on the system. Did HP give you the full Windows XP cd or just the recovery disk? Do you plan on keeping Windows on this system?

Before you go removing hardware, try shutting down the system totally for 2-3 minutes. Make sure the Knoppix cd is not in the cdrom drive. Re-start the system and see if you get a post messages. If it boots, good. If not, get into the bios setup. Look at the boot order when you get into the bios. Did you just change the first boot order to the cd, or do you have another entry for the hard drive, which should be hdd0, say the second boot device. If not change the boot order to make sure the hard drive shows as a boot option. If it is there, save the changes and re-boot. Post back the results, please. What makes this difficult, is if you get no beeps during startup. Generally, bios beeps let you know if there is a hardware issue. Generally you get 1 or 2 beeps, which tells you that the hardware is ok. If there is no speaker in the system, this complicates troubleshooting a bit.

Yes, we need to know what distro and version that you are using. There are tools you can use to set it up, but we need to know what you are using. Also, how is the internet connection configured, just a usb cable modem, wireless or through a lan card?

No, you don't need a new system. No sata drives, right? If you have grub as the bootloader, try this. While in Mandrake, go to Konqueror in superuser mode. Or if you know about vi, then use vi. Get into /boot/Grub and click on menu.lst. Look for the first line that says something like; kernel (hdo,5) vmlinuz root=........ at the end of this line try adding noapic so that you have; kernel (hdo,5) vmlinuz root=........ noapic Make sure that their is a space between the last entry and noapic. Save the changes. Reboot the system and see what happens. If ths works, then see how your video works also. Post back the results.