JHBrewer

stupid question, but did you try the partition tool (diskdrake) from the control center?

It was a few months ago so I can't remember for sure, but I think so. Can't recall the outcome, but I do remember coming away with the firm impression that, "There's more to partitioning a stick than meets the eye."

Using a journaling filesystem on a memory stick will kill it in no time. Suggest using ext2, it will be faster without the journaling - not as safe, but the problem is journaling will kill the memory stick far quicker. Of course, they are so cheap that it doesn't matter, but I don't like to waste memory sticks :)

Yes, so I've heard; but I'm not talking about using the stick to run from, I just want to install from it, which should be no more wear than ordinary usage (unless I'm missing something important here). I want to make a "DVD stick" and use it exactly the way one would use a DVD.

I am pretty sure there is a method to install mandriva on to a USB memory stick somewhere, isn't there ???.

After all Mandriva does it with their own Mandriva Flash. :D

That's what I was wondering. Obviously "it can be done", but when I tried it using fdisk the results were confusing, to say the least. "Didn't work" is an oversimplification. Does anyone know of an operational "stick partitioner"?

Wouldn't it be better (and easier) to carry around the Mandriva One and use that as an installation source instead.

I have that, of course, but Mandriva One is not a complete distro, unless you want to debate the semantics of "complete".

I want to carry around the Mandriva 8.1 installation DVD on a USB stick for convenience. It's too big for a 4GB stick, so I bought a new 8GB stick. Fine, but the new stick comes with a VFAT filesystem, which will not store a single 4.2GB file. So I tried to break it up into partitions and mkfs.ext3 on a big one; this appeared to work, but appearances are apparently misleading. I've been looking for a general introduction to "Partitions and Filesystems on a USB Stick" but couldn't find one. Does anyone know (a) if this can be done at all; and if so, (B) how to do it? This isn't the first time I've been burned by the VFAT file size limit. The worst thing about it is that a too-large file copied to a VFAT filesystem appears to have transferred without incident, but is actually just truncated at (IIRC) 1 GB. WOOPS! I meant Mandriva 2008.1, not 8.1, doh!

Last summer I bought a 64-bit Athlon and installed Mandriva 2007.1 - happy days. However, I have a weird problem with the DVD burner (an LG model): every time I try to burn an ISO image it fails at the last step (flushing cache). The same thing happens with K2b and GnomeBaker so I don't think it's a misconfiguration at that level. Today's failure was with GnomeBaker, so I'll show the messages for that:

Executing 'builtin_dd if=/big/CD/Mandriva/Flash/Flash-rescue-200-upgrade.iso of=/dev/hdc obs=32k seek=0'

/dev/hdc: "Current Write Speed" is 4.1x1352KBps.

:) Burns successfully for 11 min, 42 sec, writing 1.1GB :)

/dev/hdc: flushing cache

:-[ SYNCHRONOUS FLUSH CACHE failed with SK=3h/ASC=A0h/ACQ=80h]: Input/output error

I figure either I'm failing to do something obvious or I have faulty hardware; if it's the former, I will be grateful to anyone who corrects my ignorance. Has anyone seen this sort of error before?

You might find this useful: http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/docs/msec.php

As useful as that URL may have been, it no longer exists. What did it tell you? I have the same problem and the same question!

This makes no sense to me either, but here is the apparent situation:

If, like me, you have been running a PostFix mailserver under Mandrake 9.2 and

using the Netscape 7.1 Mail client to handle Email from several different IMAP

mailservers including your own, and if you decided to be cute about naming

the $HOME subdirectory where you kept mail from your own server (e.g. as a

reminder about _which_ mail it contained) and named same in the Netscape

Mail Advanced Server Settings for that mail account, and if you recently

upgraded to Mandrake 10, then (unless you are much wiser than I) you have

spent some frustrating hours trying to understand why you can see all your

folders but every time you try to look in one you get an Alert from Netscape

saying "no such mailbox" or something to that effect.

Here's why (apparently): Netscape still identifies the old folder tree (call it

$HOME/mymail) and lists all its folders and subfolders, but when it goes to

actually look in a folder it evidently has to go through a server on the system,

for which the default place to look is now (under Mandrake 10) $HOME/Mail

instead of just wherever Netscape asks to look. Or something like that.

Anyway, the fix that just worked for me was to move the "mymail" directory tree

into $HOME/Mail/mymail and leave the Netscape settings as they were.

Somehow Netscape still finds the folders, and now can actually access them!

Like I said, none of this makes any sense to me; but very little of this mail

server stuff does. I only got PostFix to start delivering mail again yesterday,

by fiddling with /etc/postfix/main.cf for a few more hours until I hit upon some

misconfigured parameter (don't ask me which one; at this point I was so

desperate I was changing things willy-nilly).

Hopefully this miraculous salvation out of despair will give hope to others.

Cheers -- Jess

It's working now. I had forgotten to chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1

after I had manually created that file (!) by copying the ifcfg-eth0 file created by the installation

and editing it to match the hardware driver for the other card. Sheer luck I stumbled across

this oversight and corrected it.

This changes nothing in disappointment with Mandrake 10. The installer apparently assumes

that one Ethernet board is enough for anyone, and diaables the second one (or never ENables it),

whereas under 8 and 9 it assumed correctly that if you had two boards it meant you were

planning to masquerade a LAN. I can unly conclude that Mandrake is following the same

"dumb it down for Windoze users" policy that is ruining Red Hat, alas. I would actually be

reassured to hear that this was just a screwup, rather than a new "feature".

Grrrr....

Yes, well...

Under Mandrake 9.2 the tulip driver was working fine, no mention of any de2104x --

tulip is specified in both modules.conf and modules.

Now it insists on using de2104x which _appears_ to be accepted when I

ifup eth1 and ifconfig reports eth1 running, HOWEVER...

On boot, it still says FAILED when it tries to start up eth1, and in fact

eth1 is NOT working despite its appearance in ifconfig.

I'd assume that harddrake simply has it wrong, except that I have

talked to people who have only a single Tulip board and upgraded to

Mandrake 10 from 9.2 without any problem.

So at this stage it _appears_ to be a problem specific to the use of

two different Ethernet boards at the same time, one of which is a

Tulip. This is probably well beyond my ability to fix, so the "other

distro" solution is looking pretty attractive. I have a love/hate

experience with Mandrake generally (I love the nice GUIs for

system configuration, but by the same token I hate it when they

don't work; my learning-curve time would have been better spent

becoming more proficient with the arcane command-line tools of

Linux)-- but, as in the Boy Scouts, "there's never enough time to

do it right in the first place, but there's always time to do it over!"

Maybe I'll go all the way over to Free BSD. :unsure: :sad:

Well, this is interesting. I ran harddrake2 (kudzu no longer exists, I guess) and checked the

detected Ethernat boards. It sees both boards, but for the Tulip it lists Module: de2104x

rather than tulip. So I edited my /etc/modprobe.conf file and where it said

alias eth1 tulip I changed it to alias eth1 de2104x

and then did modprobe de2104x

after which ifup eth1 worked! Now ifconfig shows

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:75:71:42:78

inet addr:24.87.89.54 Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.252.0

inet6 addr: fe80::204:75ff:fe71:4278/64 Scope:Link

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:7363 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:5467 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:6 txqueuelen:1000

RX bytes:5326622 (5.0 Mb) TX bytes:1128543 (1.0 Mb)

Interrupt:10 Base address:0xb400

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:29:10:4A:84

inet addr:192.168.0.1 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

inet6 addr: fe80::2e0:29ff:fe10:4a84/64 Scope:Link

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:6 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

RX bytes:1787 (1.7 Kb) TX bytes:714 (714.0 B)

Interrupt:9

lo Link encap:Local Loopback

inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0

inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host

UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1

RX packets:423 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:423 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:0

RX bytes:49675 (48.5 Kb) TX bytes:49675 (48.5 Kb)

and I am now setting out to get the LAN back up.

BTW, I backed up _everything_ from 9.2 before I started, so I was

able to check the old version... and there WAS NO /etc/modprobe.conf

under 9.2 as far as I can tell. Huh?!

Wish me luck. It may only _appear_ to be fixed.

lsmod:

. . .

tulip 45248 0

3c59x 39144 0

. . .

lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset Host Bridge (rev 03)

00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82845 845 (Brookdale) Chipset AGP Bridge (rev 03)

00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA/CA/DB/EB PCI Bridge (rev 12)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BA ISA Bridge (LPC) (rev 12)

00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corp. 82801BA IDE U100 (rev 12)

00:1f.2 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #1) (rev 12)

00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM SMBus (rev 12)

00:1f.4 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM USB (Hub #2) (rev 12)

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] (rev b2)

02:0b.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-7850 (rev 03)

02:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip 21041 [Tulip Pass 3] (rev 21)

02:0d.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 07)

02:0d.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! MIDI/Game Port (rev 07)

02:0e.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] (rev 78)

ifconfig:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:04:75:71:42:78

inet addr:24.87.89.54 Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.252.0

inet6 addr: fe80::204:75ff:fe71:4278/64 Scope:Link

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:213047 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:210338 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:260 txqueuelen:1000

RX bytes:66985845 (63.8 Mb) TX bytes:182820644 (174.3 Mb)

Interrupt:10 Base address:0xb400

lo Link encap:Local Loopback

inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0

inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host

UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1

RX packets:5616756 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:5616756 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:0

RX bytes:728685126 (694.9 Mb) TX bytes:728685126 (694.9 Mb)

modprobe.conf (edited - I added the line about eth1!)

alias autofs autofs4

alias eth0 3c59x

alias eth1 tulip

alias sound-slot-0 snd-emu10k1

install scsi_hostadapter /sbin/modprobe aic7xxx; /bin/true

install snd-emu10k1 /sbin/modprobe --first-time --ignore-install snd-emu10k1 && { /sbin/modprobe snd-pcm-oss; /bin/true; }

install usb-interface /sbin/modprobe usb-uhci; /bin/true

remove snd-emu10k1 { /sbin/modprobe -r snd-pcm-oss; } ; /sbin/modprobe -r --first-time --ignore-remove snd-emu10k1

last few lines of dmesg:

. . .

EXT3 FS on hda8, internal journal

EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.

PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 0000:02:0e.0

3c59x: Donald Becker and others. www.scyld.com/network/vortex.html

0000:02:0e.0: 3Com PCI 3c905C Tornado at 0xb400. Vers LK1.1.19

Linux Tulip driver version 1.1.13 (May 11, 2002)

It ssems to know the Tulip is there but does not get an address or IRQ for it. ???

A little more perhaps-relevant detail:

Somewhere I read that I should check the contents of /proc/net/dev

so I had a look. It contains a line for eth0, one for lo and one for sit0

whereas on Mandrake 9.2 it had one for lo, one for eth0 and one for eth1.

Evidently sit0 is a new invention. Under 9.2 there was also a file

/proc/net/dev_mcast with two entries for eth0 and one for eth1.

Now that file has 3 entries for eth0. Under 9.2 that was all there was

in /proc/net/ but now there is an additional directory called

/proc/net/dev_snmp6/ which contains a file called eth0 and another

called lo, each of which has a bunch of lines with Icmp6... and a number

on each line. Except for the numbers they look identical.

Obviously there have been some changes in the way devices are

assigned, at least for network devices. This seems to be "for

experts only" which usually means it should work without any

user savvy. (Like it used to.) But it doesn't.

Either some guru takes an interest in this and bails me out

or I'll have to switch to some other distro; if so, I won't

be back. I haven't got time to be debugging _released_

system tools!

"lsmod | grep tulip" yields "tulip 45248 0"

so I guess it has the driver loaded OK, although "modprobe tulip"

(I thought I'd check) yields nothing. But then

"ifconfig eth1 192.168.0.1 up" yeilds

SIOCSIFADDR: No such device

eth1: unknown interface: No such device

eth1: unknown interface: No such device

which confirms that there is no eth1 defined.

I've been trying to discover exactly where such

things as eth0, eth1 etc. are defined, but all the

docs I've seen just assume they are always there --

which has always been the case before Mdk 10.

I added "alias eth1 tulip" to modprobe.conf

but that doesn't seem to have any effect either.

Thanks for the help, though. I'm not really

helpless, but I'm at a loss as to where I should

go to read up on this stuff. Any suggestions?

I've been happily running a LAN under Mandrake 9.2 with a cable connection to

eth0 (a DEC Tulip board) and a hub connected to eth1 (a 3COM board). So I

decided to upgrade to Mandrake 10.

First I tried Upgrading. When it finished, eth0 was assigned to the 3COM board

and eth1 did not exist, notwithstanding the fact that HardDrake could see the

Tulip just fine. It simply didn't assign it to eth0 or eth1.

So I figured it was "another one of those Upgrade conflicts" and Installed clean

instead. Except for the extra work, this had no effect. Still no eth0.

So I switched the cables in order to be able to use the newly assigned eth0 for

my cable connection -- which works, but of course now I have a new IP.

However, none of the GUI config tools can recognize the Tulip board,

presumably since it is not assigned to eth0 and there IS NO eth1 any more.

So my LAN is dead until I either find some command-line way to assign

eth1 or switch back to Mandrake 9.2 (or, more likely, bail to another distro).

This doesn't seem like much of an improvement to me. I hope someone can

explain (a) what people were thinking when they made these changes; and

(B) what, if anything, I can do to recover under Mandrake 10.