AlRoss

You are spot on. As my niece would say "scary biscuits!". Having closed Windoze they now mount nicely. Wasn't necessary in 2008 though. Has something critical changed since then? Thanks for the steer. Al

Thanks. Hadn't thought about that though I'm not familiar with the concept of Windoze unmounting drives. Because my XP takes about 15 minutes to boot from cold (I kid you not ) I tend to hibernate/resume and often have hibernated it and then switched to Linux. In 2008 Spring that was possible but maybe 2009 is fussier. I'll try it out! Al

Have recently got Mandriva 2009.0 However, I cannot seem to access ntfs-3g partitions that exist on my Sony VAIO PC. These are: sda1 VAIO - the Windows XP system partition 30Gb sda2 VAIO2 - a now largely redundant documents partition - 30Gb sdb1 documents - a new documents partition 100Gb of a 320 Gb disk I did a little reading on this forum and found can't access ntfs drive after update discussing a similar looking problem together with some helpful replies. I've followed the advice given. Ian Walker advises to check if NTFS-3G is installed by doing rpm -qa | grep -i ntfs That reports with: ntfs-3g-1.2918-1mdv2009.0 ntfsprogs-2.0.0-3mdv2009.0 libntfs10-2.0.0-3mdv2009.0 which looks to me like ntfs-3g is installed. Using Dolphin I try clicking on the media listed in the 'places' bar on the left of window. This gets me an error message ... Checking /etc/fstab reveals the following: # Entry for /dev/sdb5 : UUID=aaffee12-bfb0-4a71-b060-342d44498a21 / ext3 relatime 1 1 # Entry for /dev/sdb7 : UUID=133b2107-51c1-455c-af65-6da15c681512 /home ext3 relatime 1 2 /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,ro,exec 0 0 /dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto umask=0,users,iocharset=utf8,noauto,exec,flush 0 0 # Entry for /dev/sdb1 : LABEL=Documents /mnt/documents ntfs-3g user 0 0 # Entry for /dev/sda1 : UUID=8234191434190CB3 /mnt/windows ntfs-3g user 0 0 # Entry for /dev/sda2 : UUID=86BCD462BCD44DF5 /mnt/windows_D ntfs-3g user 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 # Entry for /dev/sdb6 : UUID=726f0a08-4d31-4756-a5b1-b93310065394 swap swap defaults 0 0 The "solution" reported in the topic linked above is to replace /mnt with /media I tried that to no avail (after I eventually found out how to get recognised as root to permit editing of fstab!). Now I think I'm stuck. One oddity though - after installing 2009.0 I decided to import my Windoze fonts using the tools in the control centre. That demands the root password and it worked fine - so somethings can see into at least one of those ntfs-3g partitions. Can anyone give a steer as to what I need to do to make them accessible from an ordinary (non-root) user account? Thanks Al [moved from Software by spinynorman]

Well, happily complete re-install did work fine and it preserved my other partitions too. And the end result is good. I'm still nervous with Linux though but keeping going. Al

Thanks Adam, Actually did that but to no avail. The only available road to a console is safe mode as ctrl-alt-F1 does not respond due to keyboard not responding. Safe mode comes up with keyboard active but urpmi --auto-update -v does exactly nothing. I wonder if the internet is not available in safe mode? urpmi kdm did something though it was entirely unclear what. But whatever it did, did not do the trick. Trying to login again got much the same results as before. Trying the "restart X-server" from the login dialog got me a chance to enter a password but promptly produced an error message reporting something fatal in kdm and would I please refer to the logfile. Then it all died and back to square 1. My wee brother keeps telling me I'll be much better off with Linux. Mind you his "look at how easy this is" demos always leave me wondering how (and why?) he remembers all those console commands. but Windoze really is dire so I am gonna persist despite the setbacks. Unless anyone else has any genius ideas on how to wriggle free of this mess I'll just wipe and re-install - always hoping that 2009 doesn't do ehat 2008 did and wipe my windoze partition. Gee this is fun :unsure: Al

Used the 2009 Powerpack DVD to upgrade from Spring 2008 to 2009. A couple of oddities occurred during the upgrade including a big screenful of messages that were cunningly overlaid (read obscured) by a dialog box asking me for a YES or NO but no clue as to what the choice was about. Chose yes. OK I'm a gambler! Anyway, after upgrade completed it wanted to update a heap of packages so went ahead and did that. Now on reboot I find I'm offered a host of different login ID's including my own named one, admin, root, and a good dozen others that I do not recognise. The list features every name twice (adjacent entries) though clicking them selects the two adjacent entries together. Trying to enter a password, keyboard does not respond Boot to safe mode works but of course it is strictly console type of interface with which I am not at all familiar. Maybe I should just go away and put up with Windoze but I don't really wanna do that coz its a damn pain too. I'm thinking about scrubbing the whole install and doing a NEW install. It shouldn't hurt that much as all my data files are on another partition and I didn't have that much added software yet. Just before I take the radical route does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks Al

Thanks guys. That Ctrl + Alt + F1 caper is one to remember! The other forum link was a big help too. Using XFdrake I got back to a stable position so here I am back on Mandriva :) And it really has to be the way to go. Logging back into Windoze was very frustrating - the startup is unbelievably slow, we're talking 10 to 20 minutes - whereas Mandriva is up in around 30 seconds. But I guess I need to be a little less adventurous with environment settings for a while. Looks like my video card isn't up to the likes of Compiz Fusion. Tell you what though. At one point late last night, still blundering about in the whiteout, moving the mouse off to left or right of the screen produced a nice rotating cube effect - just a snow white cube is all. Thanks again for the great advice. Think I'll try walking for a while now. Running too soon gets me bruises :D Al

Not sure if it's gonna help but I just had a very similar problem which arose as Mandriva helpfully graunched my disk 1 partition table during install. I got a lot of helpful advice from others (see Dual Boot on Two Drives) in this section. Grub needs a "mount point" for the XP partition after which it worked fine for me. The hard bits I found was a) understanding what that was about, and then b) restoring the lost partitions, and then c) allocating the mount point. But eventually it worked out. Al

Well, thanks to all you kind guys who helped me through the dual-boot install and recovering those lost Windoze partitions. Dual boot works a treat now. I got so excited that I figured it might be fine to try some of those fancy 3D-windowing choices - Compiz Fusion I think. Oh what a fool am I! Here I am on Windoze accessing this forum for help yet again. All I can see now is a blank white screen with nothing on it at all apart from the mouse pointer. To be sure the pointer changes as the mouse moves around the screen but other than that nothing but a blank white screen. I gotta be honest and say I'm not impressed. This is the second deep hole I've fallen into and right now I'm feeling like I'm back 25 years playing dungeons and dragons on a PDP-11 (yes I am that old!). That dungeon had a totally dark cave where everything was pure guesswork and you "died" regularly. I gave it up after that. I've tried using the distro DVD to re-install. It wants to erase the partitions. I'm getting wily and ain't having any of that!! I've also tried asking it to "upgrade" to Mandriva spring 2008. It heads off down that road OK but it soon gets lost and the script gets stuck in a loop. I've also tried choosing the "safe" mode - its plain boring white too - so less safe than one might imagine. BUT, I notice that the boot process has a verbose mode which also offers an "interactive" boot up. I'm wondering if anyone knows how I can use that to undo my folly. Failing that I also have a fall back plan. If all else fails I'm gonna use Windoze to scrub those Linux partitions and start all over again. You can imagine my enthusiasm for that :unsure: Still at least I know what to do to recover my Windoze partitions next time round :D But seriously can anyone point this foolish man at a way back out of this [white] hole. Bear in mind that I can see NOTHING on the desktop. It's a total whiteout apart from the mouse pointer. Thanks in anticipation. Al [moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

Thanks John, You're a gentleman! And I have to say that the optimism grows with each passing hour. I also got back all the files I really needed from the damaged partition. That TESTDISK tool is very nifty. If it can see the directory structures and read the files it will copy them off for you albeit one at a time. There were about 200 of them but it's just a matter of using the down arrow down the directory then pressing c <repeat until finger wears out>. They all arrived in my home folder complete with original directory structure. So I've been able to ditch the dud partition, create it anew, and re-assign it to a different role. So far so good. I have to say that it does underline the value of having good backups. My brother only uses Linux and he keeps extensive full backups on an external USB HDD of around 1Tb. I'm going to look into doing the same, and backing up those Windoze partitions too. I've been lucky this time but luck is not the same as good management. I still need my Windoze apps for a while until I can migrate all the things I do. There are also some Windoze apps that I genuinely prefer such as the Serif suite of DTP, drawing, and web-editors. I guess I'm just used to the Serif application interfaces and their ease of use. For the most part the MS products have long since got relegated. I have used Thunderbird, Firefox, and OpenOffice for a long time now. I'll try to migrate those under WINE though I note that it's also possible to run VM-Ware with Linux and have a Windoze machine running in there too. I did a spell as interim IT manager for a local engineering firm during which time we migrated all the servers from Windows 2003 to VM-Ware. We moved from 8 boxes to 2 big boxes and got far better performance and manageability. I hope they went on to migrate to Linux too. The performance difference is stunning. Unfortunately I still need IE to access a particular web-site where I get work related e-mail. The site only works with IE - very tedious and IMHO a sign of poor design but there we are. But I also read one can get IE for Linux so maybe I can finally shed Bill's apron strings and fly like I always wanted to. Thanks again for your encouragement - hugely appreciated. All the best Al

Thanks Ken. Unfortunately it's an OEM install of XP so no install disk - just a recovery version. HOWEVER ... progress has been made :D I've looked around for partition repair tools and downloaded TESTDISK from http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk This runs in a Kernel window and using some hints from earlier I first entered SU <password> TESTDISK scanned the offending drive and located two partitions and was able to fully restore the critical partition. The second partition is damaged and may be lost although testdisk can still see into its file structure and offers to copy files elsewhere. So I may get some files from there too. Having used TESTDISK to recover the Windoze boot partition I was able to assign it as a boot option and Windoze booted right up - and promptly (or rather very dozily ) reminded me why I'm so keen to migrate to Linux!!! I'm still looking into what I can recover from the Windoze D partition but am going to bed a much happier bunny than I expected to be. Thanks again for help. Al

Thanks for your help. I'm feeling decidedly out of my depth and very grateful for all the kind help that's coming forward. Did just as you suggested and got the following results: Disk dev/hda 60.0Gb 60022480896 bytes 16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 116301 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes Disk identifier = 0x4190f8e3 /dev/hda1 boot=* start=1 end=1 blocks=0 id=0 system=empty / partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary /dev/hda2 boot=* start=1 end=1 blocks=0 id=0 system=empty / partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary /dev/hda3 boot=* start=1 end=1 blocks=0 id=0 system=empty / partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary /dev/hda4 boot=* start=1 end=1 blocks=0 id=0 system=empty / partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary I think that means its goosed! There were two partitions and now there appear to be zero. Somehow the Mandriva install has managed to kill these two partitions off. Most worrying. Fortunately I have backups of all my data files though not a full system backup. So I really need to get these partitions back - or at least partition 1. Any thoughts??? Thanks again, Al

Thanks for your help. I'm (very) slowly getting to find my way about. Actually swap is about 3.8Gb - probably still too big but I'll leave it just now. I looked at Mandriva control centre>local disks>manage disk partitions and found tabs for hda and hdb. The hdb tab reports the partitions previously mentioned and in sequence these are reported in detail as: /mnt/win_c2 - hdb1 - 99Gb - NTFS-3G / - hdb5 - 49Gb - journalised FS:ext 3 swap - hdb6 - 3.8Gb - Linux swap /home - hdb7 - 144Gb - journalised FS:ext 3 So far so good! The hda tab reports no partitions and the only action offered is "CREATE". No partitions are visible on hda. But perhaps this because there is no mount point??? This disk is the original Windows XP hard drive and verbs like "CREATE" make me a wee bit nervous. If "create" is going to create a mount point then perhaps I can feel confident but on the other hand it looketh like a "create partition" dialogue since the "CREATE" button only becomes available when the apparently unpartitioned disk space of hda is clicked. So, I'm feeling a little bit chicken right now. Clicking in that apparently empty space in hda and then on the "Windows" Filesystem type produces a Create Partition dialogue that offers controls for size, filesystem type, and mount point. That's all very well but I don't want to create a partition in case its going to get formatted and ... well ... game over. And besides there were two partitions on that disk and I do not have their precise sizes in my head or anywhere else. In actual fact the second partition could be abandoned in extremis. There is little on there that I cannot recover. But, feeling less than confident about this process and would much prefer to be able to see the partitions that are already there and work with them rather than use any guesswork on their sizes. Crossing-my-fingers-and-hoping in disk partitioning is not my kind of life!!! For example, if I were to go ahead and create a 55Gb partition with NTFS-3G I suspect the file allocation table will need to expand from its previous approx 30Gb and that might do irreparable damage to the Windows C drive partition. Should I not be able to see those two partitions on hda in Mandriva control centre>local disks>manage disk partitions??? Is there another way to inspect the disk partitioning and recover the detail needed. Thanks Al (starting to regret getting into this :huh: But staying optimistic :) )

Hi I only just got started with Mandriva so am a total novice in this world! I bought a second hard drive hdd2 for my PC and installed Mandriva Spring 2008 on that hard drive. It's partitioned with: 100Gb - NTFS partition for Windows 53Gb - Mandriva system space 155Gb - Mandriva documents space and a swap partition that doesn't show in Konqueror but from memory of the install was sized around 7Gb There is no sight of the original 60Gb hdd1 (Windoze C, D) in Konqeror - I guess its just ignoring it but why? ANYWAY ... the game plan was to have the PC dual-boot offering either Windoze XP Home or Mandriva. Right now all I can boot is into Mandriva. I don't know how to configure this for dual boot and (foolishly) imagined that it might have been offered on install. Can any wiser bird help please? Thanks Al