RobF

I had a little mishap which led to lilo.conf and fstab getting out of synch with the real layout of OS's and partitions on my machine. As a result, I can't access any of the Linux distros, Mandrake included, that I have on my machine, with the exception of Xandros whose lilo I installed in the MBR. Up until yesterday, I had the following layout of partitions on my second HDD hdb: hdb1 reiserfs Libranet hdb2 extended primary partition comprising the logical partitions hdb5 through hdb9 hdb3 reiserfs Xandros hdb4 swap (set up by Libranet) hdb5 ext3 Mandrakelinux root hdb6 swap (set up by Mandrake) hdb7 ext3 Mandrakelinux /home hdb8 ext3 Mepis hdb9 reiserfs Yoper Using QTparted, I shrank hdb1 to get some free space for yet another partition and then went about installing SAM in that partition. SAM is a reduced and customized version of Mandrakelinux 10.0 (shrunk to 200 MB) with Xfce as windows manager and a Mac OS X Panther theme. It's been put together by a fellow in Germany who used the Mandrake "make-live-CD" utility to remaster a customized Mandrake live CD distro. Hence, SAM uses the Mandrakelinux partition manager (DiskDrake) to install itself from the live CD to the HDD. Everything appeared to go allright with the install, although I was slightly alarmed when the installer announced that the newly created partition in which SAM was to be installed would be named hdb5 and the original hdb5 and all higher partitions would be renamed to (original number + 1). I had expected that SAM would be installed in a new partition hdb10 and all the other partitions would remain the same. But then I thought that the Xandros boot manager would be able to sort that out and reassociate OS's and partitions during the scan of partitions and filesystems on bootup. Previously, whenever I installed another Linux, I had a copy of the bootloader of that new Linux installed in the new root partition, not in the MBR. This allowed me to keep Xandros' lilo as the default bootloader. After each new install I would then boot into Xandros and Xandros would somehow discover that a new OS had been added and add the appropriate entries into fstab and lilo.conf and the Xandros boot splash screen. However that didn't happen this time. No new entry appeared for SAM in the boot menu, and I cannot successfully boot anymore into any of the other Linuxes (at one point or another in the boot sequence the system will hang - lethal error). I can still get into Xandros. Only afterwards I realized that SAM (being just a remastered Mandrake) very likely identifies itself to the system as "Mandrakelinux". So SAM probably went into hdb5 as bootable "Mandrakelinux". This partition had been the boot partition for an OS with the same name, i.e. "Mandrakelinux". Moreover, there is now a bootable "Mandrakelinux" in partitions hdb6 and hdb8, too. Perhaps this utterly confused lilo. The layout of partitions on hdb after the install of SAM is as follows (as obtained with partimage and with the Mepis live CD partitions utility). As you can see, all the former hdb partitions from hdb5 and higher got bumped up one number. hdb1 reiserfs Libranet hdb2 extended primary partition comprising the logical partitions hdb6 through hdb10 hdb3 reiserfs Xandros hdb4 swap (set up by Libranet) hdb5 ext2 SAM hdb6 ext3 Mandrakelinux root hdb7 swap (set up by Mandrake) hdb8 ext3 Mandrakelinux /home hdb9 ext3 Mepis hdb10 reiserfs Yoper However, this new layout is not reflected in the Xandros lilo.conf; it is still the same as before the SAM install. Furthermore, fstab has been severely crippled (unfortunately, I did not save a copy of fstab before the SAM install). None of the Linuxes on hdb appear in it, not even the Xandros root system. Here is the current version of fstab. /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /disks/C vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,nouser,async,umask=0,showexec=no 0 0 /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 /disks/D ntfs ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,nouser,async,umask=0 0 0 /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,nosuid,nodev,exec,user,noauto,async,unhide 0 0 /dev/fd0 /mnt/fd0 auto rw,nosuid,nodev,exec,nouser,noauto,async 0 0 proc /proc proc rw 0 0 usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs rw,devmode=0666 0 0 Also, the autogenerated map of devices in /etc/devices/devices.inf is not OK. In it, there are entries on [diskvol.ide.......] and [image.......] only for hda, none for hdb. Does anyone have any idea what settings DiskDrake may have affected when it reassigned the partitions associated with the various Linux distros on hdb? How can I rectify the resulting corruption or truncation of lilo.conf, fstab and /etc/devices/devices.inf and any other system config files that may have been affected? Your help would be much appreciated. Robert

Checking the integrity of a downloaded ISO file is extremely simple, Alan. Usually the md5sum of a given ISO file is published on the ftp site from which you're getting the ISO, in the same download directory. In the case of SystemRescueCd-x86-0.2.14, the md5sum is 0d1a4582d2ebe2fbf318fb15a9e9b77d Once you have the ISO file on your disk, open a console, navigate to the directory where your downloaded file resides (e.g cd /home/eroica/Desktop or whatever) and type md5sum systemrescuecd-x86-0.2.14.iso After a short while, the console will report the md5sum of the ISO you downloaded. If it matches the above md5sum, then you know that you've got a good copy of the ISO file. It's more common that an ISO file gets corrupted when it's burned to CD than when it's downloaded from the net on a broadband connection. Try to set the write speed of your CD-Rom drive to less than the maximum (e.g. if the max is 40x, burn at 32x or 24x), pick good quality media, and don't run any other program while the CD is being written. If you have Mandrake running on your machine why not use K3b to burn your CD (Tools > Burn ISO). K3b is an excellent CD burning program. You can find it on the Mandrake menu under Applications or Utilities or perhaps System > Archiving.

You may want to take a look at the following thread http://mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=16523

Correction re AcronisPartitionExpert In May of this year, I downloaded a demo version of AcronisPartitionExpert that was disabled in the way I described in a previous post in this thread. That demo apparently can still be obtained as a standalone program at the URL http://www.acronis.com/files/partitionexpert2003_d_en.exe Clicking on this link should open the download manager of your browser and download the PartitionExpert installer for Windows. As I said, this program is disabled and completely safe to use; it also doesn't seem to expire with time. Since May, Acronis appears to have changed their policy about program trials. You won't openly find the standalone demo of PE on their website anymore, at least I didn't. Instead they now offer a free download trial of Acronis Disk Director Suite which includes PartitionExpert. I haven't installed that package but from the download memo it looks as though that might be a time-limited trial (perhaps 15 days) of the fully-functional program. In that case you COULD make changes to your disk, and as such the program would not be purely diagnostic and safe. Robert

init is the program that the kernel starts after the kernel has been loaded from disk into memory and after it has initialized the devices and drivers and mounted the root filesystem. init then takes care of the rest of the boot sequence. You know you've gotten to init when you see the gentoo linux mascot (for SysResCD), or in Mandrake when you see the blue "Welcome to Mandrakelinux" message. How far did you get trying to boot the CD? It could be that your ISO has been corrupted or that the CD wasn't written properly. Did you run md5sum <name of System Rescue CD ISO> and check it against the published checksum? Did you burn it to CD as an ISO image? If all that is OK, you may want to burn another CD, perhaps at slower speed, and with no other program running. There is a SysResCD manual on the CD as well as on their website. Looking through it quickly, I didn't see anything in it on init options. They also have a user forum at http://www.sysresccd.org/forums/ If you have a broadband connection, you could download the ISO for the Knoppix v. 3.4 live CD (700 MB) which also contains QTParted 0.4.4. I didn't mention that because I don't believe you have enough space on your HDD to handle such a large ISO. But perhaps a friend or someone at work can burn it for you. But, really, I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to get a working CD of SysResCD - lots of people use it without a problem. Robert

This is getting off topic, but Lycoris: No Linspire: Yes, tested their live CD, don't like their marketing hype, worse than MS Libranet 2.8.1: very nice, I'll be spending a lot of time with it I must say that whenever I get fed up with the endless fiddling that most Linux distros seem to require, I fire up Xandros, enjoy its nice looks and reliable touring performance and actually get something done. The other distros I'm currently running are Mandrake 10.0, Libranet 2.8.1, Mepis 2004-b05, and Yoper V2. Xandros 2.0: Honda Accord (nice car) Mandrake 10.0: BMW Libranet 2.8.1: Volvo or 4WD pickup truck Mepis: Corvette Yoper: Jaguar? Hard to decide between them. And then there are Knoppix, PCLinuxOS, Kanotix, SAM, DSL, Puppy, etc. etc. Aren't we lucky to have these choices? By comparison, living as an unwitting slave to MS (and, more seriously, risking your ID and money in the process) is like living in a dungeon. Robert

Alan wrote: < If I use QTParted to resize win_d and / would that be non-destructive? First find out whether you in fact have space available in win_d that can be freed up. In Windows XP, go to My Computer, right click on Local Disk (D:), then Properties > Tools > Defragment Now > Analysis. That will give you a graphical display of the state of fragmentation of that partition. If there is a block of "unmovable files" (color-coded green) near the upper (right) end of the partition, then you're out of luck. E.g. my bootable Windows XP partition (C: or win_c) is less than half full but Windows has placed a block of unmovable files close to its upper end. As a result, under QTParted this partition shows up as 97% full and in practice cannot be resized. If there isn't such a block in your D: partition, then you should defragment that partition and then analyze again how much contiguous free space exists at the upper end now. Theoretically, that space can be shrunk nondestructively (but leave some space for Windows), and the freed up space can then be made available to the / partition of Mandrake. But I'm not sure whether that can be done simply by grafting that space onto the upper end of the MDK / partition, and whether it can be done without destroying the data in that partition. What can be done is to delete the / partition (which destroys all data in it), and then using its space combined with the space gained from resizing the Windows partition to create a new larger / partition (and then reinstalling MDK, after you've also backed up the /home partition). You really have to take a look at the layout of the partitions on your disk and experiment with simulating the repartitioning without writing the changes to the partition table on disk. That can be done with QTParted. If you can't easily get QTParted, you could - under Windows XP - download and run Acronis PartitionExpert 2003. That's a good partition manager which is sold as part of a package of disk utilities called Acronis Disk Director Suite ($50). Acronis has made available for free a disabled demo of PartitionExpert which has all the functionality of the full program except that you cannot write the changes to disk, i.e. you merely simulate the repartitioning in memory but you can't actually do anything to your disk. That makes it completely safe to run as an analysis tool. You could run through the procedures that I suggested above and in my earlier post. Then once you know what can be done on your disk, you could use QTParted to actually do it. You can also learn a lot about disk partitioning from the free 80-page User's Guide to PartitionExpert which you can download from the Acronis website. http://www.acronis.com/products/partitionexpert/ If you have questions about QTParted, you can go to its user forum http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/forums/ You could also get yourself a second hard disk for less change than most commercial partitioning software and install Xandros OCE on it which is available for free. In my judgment, that may be the best route for folks who have freshly arrived from the Windows camp to get acquainted with Linux. I think Xandros is as good as Mandrake but it's more user-friendly and much more resembles Windows XP. The free OCE is the full-fledged Standard Edition (which sells for $40) except that the CD burning program has been limited in its capability (4x max burn speed; you can get around that by installing K3b). I bet you'd like Xandros. Their hardware recognition is excellent and the installation very easy. They also have an excellent user support forum. From Xandros you could copy your user data from the MDK /home over to Xandros /home. The Xandros lilo bootloader would replace Mandrake's, and from it you could then optionally boot into Windows XP, Mandrake or Xandros. That way you could test drive two different versions of Linux and utilize their respective virtues at your choice. I use Xandros as my default Linux system and from its boot menu I can choose to boot into Windows XP or any of five different Linux distributions (including MDK 10.0). I've used QTParted repeatedly to carve up and rearrange the space on my two hard disks, to set up a total of 11 partitions for 4 different filesystems (FAT32, ntfs, ext3 and reiserfs) used by those 6 different OS's. I haven't lost any data in the process.

I'm pretty sure I used QTParted v.0.4.4 twice to resize (in this case shrink) Windows XP ntfs partitions, to create free space that can then be made available for ext3 or reiserfs formatted partitions for Linux. Shrinking your ntfs partition may be the easiest part. To make the freed up disk space available to Mandrake may be more involved. It may require backing up your Mandrake system (both / and /home partitions), deleting the existing Mandrake partitions, creating new partitions in the combined free space and then reinstalling Mandrake. There may be some esoteric command line utility available for Linux gurus that allows you to resize, move, add to, format etc., your partitions without destroying any of the data that resides in those partitions. I vaguely recall once having come across such a thing - or perhaps it's just wishful thinking. QTParted can be found on the SystemRescueCD-x86 v.0.2.14, the Knoppix CD v. 3.4 and the Mepis-2004-b05-en-fr CD, all of which are bootable live CD's whose ISO's can be downloaded from the net and then burned to CD (SystemRescue is the smallest, 100 MB). Or you can install it under Mandrake as an mdk.rpm package but I seem to remember that the latter version didn't work as well for me as did the versions on the above mentioned live CD's. Just keep in mind that if you install it under Mandrake to make the partition changes then once you COMMIT the changes, all of your MDK incl. QTParted will be gone, and you've got no more QTParted to make any further changes. Also the partitions to which you make changes should be unmounted but the partition in which you run QTParted will have to be mounted. See my post in the following thread http://www.mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=16523

You seem to have plenty of options. 1. Do as bvc says. 2. Get yourself another hard disk and set it up as hdb. They sell for about US$1/GB. 3. Repartition your Mandrake partitions. Re 3: You don't have to put out money for Partition Magic. There is a free PM clone available that runs under Linux. It's called QTParted, and I believe there is an mdk.rpm available of the most recent version, v. 0.4.4. Better still, you could download the ISO (about 100 MB) for SystemRescueCD v. 0.2.14 and burn it to CD-R or CD-RW. Even an 8 cm mini-CD will hold it, and you won't regret having that useful CD. It's a bootable live CD which includes QTParted v.0.4.4 along with a ton of other useful programs. You can boot from that CD (provided your BIOS is set to enable booting from CD ahead of booting from HDD), and type run_qtparted from the root prompt. If run from that live CD, QTParted will allow you to manipulate your partitions and write the changes to disk without mounting the partitions (you shouldn't write changes of partitions to disk while they are mounted; that may be a problem if you install and run QTParted from within Mandrake because Mandrake, I believe, mounts most partitions by default). You first would have to back up your current Mandrake system (e.g. to CD; it may be sufficient to backup your /home folder if you haven't installed many new programs in / beyond what you got from the distro CD's). Then, using QTparted, DELETE the Mandrake / and /home partitions. You could leave the swap partition untouched (if you have one), or you could also delete it if you want to change its size. The free space that you created when you resized your hda5 (win_d) partition with the MandrakeMove partition manager (if in fact that took hold) should also show up at this point. Using all the freed up space, then CREATE two (or three) new partitions for MDK / and /home (and swap, resp.), with different size allocations than what you had before (e.g. 1.8 or 2 GB for /, 125 MB for swap, the rest for /home). Choose ext3 as the filesystem format for / and /home. You can experiment with QTParted and manipulate partitions at will - nothing will be written to disk right away, and you can always UNDO your changes. Take notes of how you laid out the new partitions, and when you're happy with your handiwork, COMMIT the changes. That will write the new partition info to the partition table on disk (and you'll lose all your data in the changed partitions). Then reinstall Mandrake in the new partitions, using a custom (or expert) install. If it gets to be too hairy in terms of all the detailed stuff that the MDK installer wants to know about partitions, their names, mount points, size, beginning and end, etc., you can always abandon the install at this point. As another option, you could then delete all the new Mandrake partitions that you'd made and just leave free space on hda, and during the new install go with the option of "use all free space" and have Mandrake allocate it to partitions according to its own choice. But who knows, you may then wind up with something similar to what you had before, i.e. inadequate space for /. This repartitioning procedure may appear cumbersome but it's likely to work. There may be a way of resizing your / (i.e. letting it grow at the upper, right end) if you have free space available (you should because you shrunk your hda5 (win_d) partition). Or perhaps you can take some space from /home by shrinking it from the right end (that may require first defragmenting that partition). Anyway, QTParted should give you a clear idea of the layout of your disk space and should be able to let you know what can and what cannot be done, nondestructively (i.e. before COMMITing the changes). It's also possible that additional trickery can be done from the command line - I'm not a Linux guru. Once Mandrake is reinstalled, move your saved home folder (e.g. /home/eroica, or whatever you call it) back into the proper location. Make sure the ownership, group membership and access permissions on your /home/eroica folder are correct. They should be something like this (do ls -l /home/eroica) drwxr-xr-x 79 eroica eroica 4096 Jul 13 15:47 eroica/ not drwxr-xr-x 79 root root 4096 Jul 13 15:47 eroica/ If they are anything other than eroica & eroica (which would lead to KDE getting stuck on bootup) then do, as root chown -R eroica.eroica /home/eroica Having written all this, I would actually go with recommendation #2, if I were you. Get yourself a second hard disk of 40 GB or more from Seagate, WD or Maxtor; it won't cost you more than US$50. You're really cramped for space. Robert P.S. Yes, be careful. The one thing that would make me feel a little uncomfortable is the fact that your Mandrake resides on the same disk as the Windows XP boot partition. Not a few people have reported that Windows (XP?) can at times be a little temperamental when it comes to attempts to resize its ntfs partitions, and/or installing or modifying Linux on a shared disk. That's just a note of caution - it may overstate the likelihood of trouble.

Thanks, Ed, for the interesting info and the link to a readable write up about chmod. I checked the permissions on my home folder /home/robert, using Konqueror > F9 > Properties > Permissions. They do indeed match 755 which is also equivalent to drwxr-xr-x, i.e. owner rwx, group r-x, other r-x. So all is well. Interestingly, when I do ls -l (or ll) on /home from within Mandrake, I get the line drwxr-xr-x 79 robert robert 4096 Jul 11 01:04 robert/ When I do it from within another Linux OS, I get drwxr-xr-x 79 501 501 4096 Jul 11 01:04 robert/ Wonder why that is so and what the 501 means. Robert

I think aRTee is right. I had the exact same KDE error messages that you got, and it turned out to be an issue of ownership and group membership of my home folder /home/robert. I applied aRTee's fix and that cured the problem. Thanks, aRTee! See the following thread: http://www.mandrakeusers.org/index.php?act...t=0#entry129368 Robert

cannonfodder, I used Konqueror as root to copy /home from hdb7 to hdb5, not the command line. That changed the permissions so that I wound up with the following for my /home/robert folder: drwxr-xr-x 79 root root 4096 Jul 11 01:04 robert/ KDE couldn't handle that and hung. I changed it by typing, as root chown -R robert.robert /home/robert Doing ll /home now yields drwxr-xr-x 79 robert robert 4096 Jul 11 01:04 robert/ That seems to have fixed the problem, and it looks as though that was the only thing I needed to do - everything is working fine again, at least in some preliminary testing. But according to Steve the user and group membership should be drwxr-xr-x 79 robert xgrp 4096 Jul 11 01:04 robert/ What should it be? Another user advised me to also check my home dir permissions and adjust them appropriately, and he suggested the command chmod -R 755 /home/robert What are the correct settings, and what does the chmod command do? Could someone comment? Thanks.

I recently installed Mandrakelinux 10.0 and went along pretty much with the default choices of the installer to take all the space that I'd freed up on my second hard disk. The installer proceeded to set up three separate partitions, one for / with all the system subdirs underneath it, one for swap space, and one for the /home dir. Subsequently, I decided to shrink the /home partition, and in the process moved the /home dir into the root partition, and then after resizing the former /home partition, moved the /home dir back into the resized /home partition. Anyway, I believe that in the copying process the ownership and permissions for the /home dir somehow got changed, and now KDE can't start up for user robert in /home. The error messages from KDE are: "An error was detected when establishing interprocess communication for KDE", "Could not read network connection list .... verify the dcopserver program is running", "KDE is unable to start ..... No write access to $HOME directory /home/robert", "Config files blah blah blah in /home/robert/.kde not writable", "Could not start ksmserver", etc.). I think the problem may be that I need to reset the ownership and permissions for /home to the original values. What would be the name for the owner and for the group and the access permissions for both the /home dir and my own home dir /home/robert? Could somebody who has got the same partition configuration as I do (i.e. a separate partition for /home), please relate those values to me or guide me to some MDK reference that gives that info? Many thanks in advance. Robert