pmpatrick

Try a discount linux cd place like edmunds:

http://www.edmunds-enterprises.com/linux/m...&category=2

This is all perfectly legal by the way.

You have several hard drives and that can sometimes confuse the bootloader, grub. It appears that linux is installed on the 250 GB drive and from the "windows1" you may have more than one version of windows installed on your computer. Is the 250GB drive listed first in the boot order for the hard drives in your bios setup?

To check on how grub sees the hard drives at boot time do the following:

1. Reboot the system and as soon as you see the grub boot selection screen hit the Esc key. A little warning window will come up advising you are leaving the graphic mode and going to a text mode selection screen. Just hit the Enter key to continue and you will find your self in a primitive ncurses version of your boot selection screen;

2. Hit the "c" key and you will find yourself at a grub prompt that looks like this - "grub>". From here you can run some commands to see how grub is detecting your hard drive setup at boot time;

3. In particular, I want to confirm that grub sees the drive that you installed mandriva on as (hd0,4). To do that run the following at the grub prompt:

grub> find /sbin/init

It should return the value (hd0,4). If it doesn't note what the return value is, eg (hd1,4). It will be in the form of (hdx,4). When your done, just hit the Esc key to get out of the grub prompt and power off the computer.

Post back your results here.

Valikhan, I believe you are mistaken. On my mdv2008 the ide hard drive is still dealt wiht as /dev/hde which is the normal designation for that drive. Take a look at this output for fdisk -l /dev/hde:

Disk /dev/hde: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x44914491

  Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hde1   *		   1		1766	14185363+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hde2			1767		8286	52371900	f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hde5			1767		3006	 9960268+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hde6			3007		5675	21438711	b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hde7			5676		8286	20972826   83  Linux

and for hdparm /dev/hde:

/dev/hde:
multcount	 = 16 (on)
IO_support	=  0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq	 =  0 (off)
using_dma	 =  1 (on)
keepsettings  =  0 (off)
readonly	  =  0 (off)
readahead	 = 256 (on)
geometry	  = 65535/16/63, sectors = 156301488, start = 0

That drive is definitely using the standard ide protocol instead of the scsi protocol which is what you get in the newer kernels that designate ide drives as sdx. Oddly, however, both my optical drives, one ide and one sata, are designated with the newer srx notation and dma cannot be set on either one which indicates that the scsi protocol is being used by these devices. This may be due to the fact that the hard drive is on a Promise ide controller card which had to be added as the motherboard only has one ide port. Be curious to see if anyone with an ide hard drive, as opposed to an optical drive, has the device file for the drive as hdx.

Also, moStudio, you can use any live cd to access your current mandriva installation. However, just to clarify my earlier post, you need to navigate to the mount point of your mandriva root partition then navigate to mandriva's fstab and menu.lst so the full path to the files I want you to post would be:

<mandriva mount point>/etc/fstab and

<mandiva mount point>/boot/grub/menu.lst

I don't have any Mandy 2008 installed on a real machine right now (just a VMWare virtual box), but IDE harddisks should be found under /dev/sdx, not /dev/hdx as before.

Not true. In mdv 2008 my ide drive is still designated hdx.

moStudio, boot up in livecd mode and post the following files here:

/boot/grub/memu.lst and /etc/fstab

menu.lst is the configuration file for the bootloader, grub and fstab will tell everyone how linux sees your hard drive configuration.

I've had similar experiences as well. Sometimes even deleting all the partitions doesn't work and windows will balk at creating a new partition for a fresh install. The partition table is probably pretty screwed up between the partitioning operations performed by linux and windows during their respective installs.

Go to the hard drive manufacturer's website and download their hard drive diagnostic utilities. They are usually available on a bootable iso for cd-r or floppy image. These utilities usually contain a zero fill utility, sometimes called a low level format utility. This utility will write zeroes to every sector on your hard drive and leave it in the same condition as when it left the factory. You will lose all data on the drive after a zero fill but sometimes it's the only way to recover from a really borked partition table.

I installed mdv 2008 powerpack last night on my laptop. Generally looks pretty solid/stable so kudos there.

Biggest annoyance - mandriva apparently decided to "crappify" firefox with some weird extensions which are installed by default. One had to do with some blogging service and I can't recall what the other is about. I assume both are a source of revenue to mandriva similar to Dell bundling software on new PCs. I had to disable both in firefox "Add-ons". Hopefully, this trend will end here for mandriva, at least on the for pay versions. Are these extensions present in the free versions?

Edit: The extensions in question are Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, BlogRovr and ScribeFire.

Biggest technical problem - configuration of broadcom wireless card. There seem to be some real issues with getting ndiswrapper to create a wireless interface and stopping the open source bcmxx driver from taking control of the card. Fortunately, for the first time, the open source broadcom driver(bcmxx) actually works with my wireless card so I didn't have to delve into the problem very deeply.

In kde, you can right click on the icon and from the menu disable the updater from starting on boot and then quit the application. I assume you can do the same in gnome.

I k3b you go in the menus to Tools>Burn CD Image in case anyone is wondering. If you're running kde, k3b will come up and offer to burn the image if you double click on the iso image file in konqueror.

You can try rebuilding the kernel module by running as root:

# /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

You will need to have your kernel source installed to rebuild the vboxdrv kernel module. Also, make sure that your kernel and kernel source match. You can check that by examining the output of:

$ rpm -qa | grep kernel

The error message indicates a mismatch between the vboxdrv kernel module and the running kernel. This could be due to the install routine compiling the vboxdrv kernel module on a system with a mismatched kernel and kernel source or the install program installing a precompiled vboxdrv kernel module from a system running a different kernel than the one you are using.

Take a look at mcrypt. mcrypt only works on a single file at a time so the general procedure woud be to tar up all the files you want to encrypt into a single tar archive and then use mcrypt on that tar archive. The syntax is:

$ mcrypt <filename>

at which you are prompted for a password. Fill in with the strong password of your choice. You will need the password for decrypting the file. Mcrypt creates a new file called filename.nc by default. That can be burnt to your cd-r.

To decrypt, the syntax is:

$ mcrypt -d filename.nc

enter the password used when filename.nc was created. "mdecrypt" can be used in lieu of "mcrypt -d".

Do you have java and flash installed?

This has been an issue when introduced at first ( 2.6.19 I believe ) but since 2.6.21 it's a non-issue. And hdparm is good only on IDE drives... on SATA ones its next to useless.

Unfortunately, it's still an issue for me:

	# hdparm -t /dev/sdc7

/dev/sdc7:
Timing buffered disk reads:   10 MB in  3.37 seconds =   2.96 MB/sec

Other relevant hardware:

intel 965 chipset motherboard

core2duo E6600 2.4GHz

2GB of ram

DVD drive on the single onboard marvell ide port

Seagate 80GB ide hard drive on the Promise controller is the one with the speed problem(tried jumpering both master and cable select with no change in speed).

Two seagate sata drives on the onboard sata ports are fine.

I'm running FC7 with the most recent kernel update, 2.6.22.4-65.fc7 #1 SMP. All earlier FC7 kernels had the same problem. Identical problem with sidux with a 2.6.22.3 kernel which disappeared when I upgraded to the sidux 2.6.22.6 kernel. Speeds are fine with the mdv2007 and mdv2007.1 kernels.

I've also seen similar reports from others, particularly with the 2.6.22 kernels. The 2.6.23 kernels are suppose to have this cleaned up based upon my limited research.

Quandd, check your disk speed with hdparm:

# hdparm -t /dev/<insert drive for root partition>

With certain hardware configurations/kernels I've seen terribly slow disk speeds. Primary culprits are changes in libata in the 2.6.22 series of kernels and pata drives. Ever since they rolled ide/pata support into libata I've seen some really weird problems on certain hardware. Things seem better in 2.6.23 kernels.

I suspect your old PIII cdrom doesn't like the cd-r/cd-rw media you are using and is having a hard time reading data off the cd. Your hardware is i686. Do you have any other cd media you can try?

At least with ISPs in the US, b=bit and B=byte=8 bits. Speeds are always given in lower case bit notation so:

768 kb/s = 96 KB/s

1mb/s = 125 KB/s

Also:

Hi, I would like to install Fedora 7 on my old pentium 3 pc. According to their wiki, LiveCD won't work for me because my pc isn't i686

Pentium 3 is i686. In fact, Pentium II is i686 and Pentium is i586.

Have you tried the bcmwl5a driver with ndiswrapper instead of the bcmwl5 one? That's the one that I have to use on my dell with a broadcom chipset wireless mini-pci card.

Also, what version of ndiswrapper are you using? If you installed ndiswrapper via mandirva's rpm, you have to make sure the rpm you used was compiled on the same kernel you are using or you get the "invalid driver" error message when you try to load ndiswrapper. If all else fails, I'd try uninstalling mandriva's ndiswrapper rpm and compiling the most recent ndiswrapper from source.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/

Make sure you have the correct kernel source installed before doing so.

I thought the real big news was they are opening the specs on ati graphics cards as of September 10:

http://www.linux.com/feature/119049

AMD briefed Linux.com this morning on a pending announcement regarding the open sourcing of drivers for ATI graphics cards. It's official -- AMD will make code and specifications for ATI graphics cards available on the Internet on September 10.

 

We spoke with Phil Hester, senior vice president and CTO at AMD, and Chris Schlaeger, director of AMD's Operating System Research Center, along with Jon Carvill, AMD's manager of public relations. They confirmed the rumors reported earlier on Slashdot, that everything necessary for community-driven and -maintained 2-D and 3-D drivers for ATI Radeon X1000 and HD 2000 graphics will be made available next week.

This is huge; it means fully functional open source drivers for ati graphics cards are just around the corner. This will put pressure on nvidia to open up their specs since both ati and intel have opened theirs.

Try adding:

linux noapic, nolapic, acpi=off, pci=noacpi

or:

linux pci=noacpi

Just to clarify, arctic is describing how to restore grub, your linux bootloader, by booting from your mandriva one cd and using the tools there to reinstall grub to your mbr. Once you get grub restored and booting your current linux install, you can configure grub to also boot your windows installation.

It's not clear to me whether you've tried this, but the first thing you usually try when the installation hangs is to install passing certain kernel parameters. Try doing the installation again, hit F3 I believe to get to a boot prompt and type:

linux noapic, nolapic, acpi=off

Your error messages point to a problem with acpi and the above is the usually suggested workaround.

As far as your sata dvd drive, I have one and it works perfectly in mandriva 2007.1. Just to follow up on scarecrow's post. I had issues installing mdv2007.1 on an intel 965 chipset motherboard when using an ide dvd drive.

The reason for the problems on later intel motherboards is that intel is phasing out support for pata/ide in favor of sata. As a result, intel no longer makes its own ide controllers as part of the standard 965 chipset and if motherboard manufacturers want pata/ide support they have to include an ide controller from a third party. ASUS motherboards based on the intel 965 chipset use the jmicron ide controller on their mbs and intel uses the marvell ide controller on their mbs. Unfortunately, the earlier linux kernels supported neither the jmicron or marvell ide controllers and installs would abort after loading the kernel with a no cdrom drive found error. The issues with the jmicron ide controller appear to be fixed in the mdv2007.1 kernel but I can attest from personal experience that there are still isuues with the marvell controller in mdv2007.1. I wound up having to do a hard drive install from the iso. After installation, my old ide dvd drive was detected perfectly and worked fine but the installation routine kept losing the drive if I tried to install off of the dvd drive.

That's the bad news. The good news is if you use your sata optical drive, all these issues with the ide controller go away. That was my main motivation in getting my sata optical by the way. I've had no issues with installation or use when using my sata optical in mdv2007.1, slackware 12, sidux and fedora 7. Previously, I couldn't install with an ide optical in mdv2007.1 and slackware 12.

It's been a while since I've done this but IIRC, if you want to generate a new hdlist you can do so by running:

$ cd <path to directory with rpms>

$ genhdlist

That will generate both an hdlist and a synthesis file. If you also want an md5sum file, cd to the directory with your rpms and run:

$ genhdlist --md5sum

For further options, see man genhdlist.

The free versions of mandriva do not include the madwifi drivers because they are not free software. Only GPLed free software is included in the free versions of mandriva. The power pack versions do include non-free, proprietary drivers like madwifi, however.

Draker, have you set up your urpmi sources using the Easy-Urpmi link at the top of the page? The madwifi driver may be in one of the non-free repos from plf or perhaps in contrib. If not, you will have to compile the driver from source which is what you apparently tried to do. The error message you are getting is because you don't have the kernel headers installed for your kernel.

I would recommend setting up your urpmi sources first and see if there is a precompiled rpm avilable in one of the repos for the madwifi driver. If not, we can get into installing the correct kernel headers and compiling the madwifi kernel module from source.

You can try running:

$ sync

before removing the media. That will flush the filesystem buffers in ram to disk. From info sync:

`sync' writes any data buffered in memory out to disk. This can

include (but is not limited to) modified superblocks, modified inodes,

and delayed reads and writes. This must be implemented by the kernel;

The `sync' program does nothing but exercise the `sync' system call.

 

The kernel keeps data in memory to avoid doing (relatively slow) disk

reads and writes. This improves performance, but if the computer

crashes, data may be lost or the file system corrupted as a result.

The `sync' command ensures everything in memory is written to disk.

 

Any arguments are ignored, except for a lone `--help' or `--version'

(*note Common options::).

 

An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value

indicates failure.

IIRC when you unmount a filesystem, the sync command is automatically run before the dismount.

It's probably the kernel in mdv2007 vs mdv2007.1. That board uses the jmicron sata/pata controller which was a real problem for earlier kernels along the lines you are experiencing, i.e. pata opticals and sata hard drives not detected after the kernel loads. It's very difficult to figure out what's in a mandriva kernel since they are heavily patched with backports but I would guess the newer mdv2007.1 kernel has been patched to deal with the jmicron controller whereas the older mdv2007 kernel was not.