pmpatrick

If you made a boot floppy during the install you can try booting off the floppy and see what happens. It sounds like your bootloader is not configured properly. If you can boot from the floppy and get into MD 9, you can reconfigure the thing by going into Mandrake Control Center>Boot>BootConfig. If you didn't make a boot floppy, there may be ways to get at your bootloader and reconfigure it but I wouldn't call them simple. Probably your best bet would be to reinstall, make a boot floppy and try again.

I've had no problems at all in MD 9.0. I did the install, the card was detected and it works fine. I have my two hard drives on the Promise IDE 1 configured master and slave. On the on board IDE controller I have a DVD drive and an IDE Tape drive on IDE 1 and a CD burner on IDE 2. I have nothing on the Promise IDE 2. I mention that because I recall exchanging emails with someone that tried putting a CD burner on Promise IDE 2 and he couldn't get his hard drive detected on Promise IDE 1 during a Linux install but when he removed the CD burner from Promise IDE 2 everything worked fine. Maybe I'm just lucky. With MD 8.2, the install went OK and I was able to boot into MD8.2. However, in mcc>Hardware my Promise card was listed under Unknown Devices. After running for a couple hours, system performance would seriously degrade often times taking several minutes to launch an application. I could find no running process using ps auxww to account for this. My theory was that the Promise card, being a DMA device with direct access to system memory, was somehow screwing things up. I never pursued this because everything works fine in MD 9.0.

Here's a link that might help. I haven't tried it myself though. http://xlife.zuavra.net/columns/20020211.php

Supermount won't work for audio CDs but works fine for data CDs. If I put an audio CD in I get the same error message I would get when no CD is present. I know from reading the posts on this board that there are a lot of issues with supermount. Audio CDs played fine when I initially installed MD 9.0; it just suddenly stopped working. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Also, I tried disabling supermount in mcc and mounting an audio cd in the console but got an error message telling me to designate the file system type. What file type should be designated for audio CDs ?

I have a Promise ATA 100 card which worked poorly in MD 8.2 but works great in MD 9.0. I am not using raid however.

I notice you have an IBM hard drive. If you want to thoroughly check it out you can download a great utility from IBM at the following link: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm With this utlity you can completely wipe the disk clean by zero filling every sector which will wipe out your partition table so you can start clean.

Also, did you make a boot floppy during the install and, if so, can you boot from it ? If you can boot from the floppy then lilo is not configured properly and it can be reconfigured in Mandrake Control Center>Boot>Bootconfig. My guess is that's not your problem and you won't be able to boot from the floppy either. In that case, your partition table may be corrupted. I say that because the system halts right at the point where the partition table is read. What should follow is a listing of the partitions on your hard drive but the operating system can't read them from the partition table apparently. A messed up partition table can occur if there were prior partitions on the hard drive that were not deleted properly or new ones created with a partitioning utility that was not functioning properly or used properly. If this is the case you can try using fdisk if you have a widows boot floppy and I beleive there is a similar linux utility which you may be able to access in rescue mode from a boot off CD1 as as mentioned above. You can also do yet another install, this time in expert mode were the existing partitions are graphically laid out during the partition/ format part of the install and that might give you some idea of what's going on with your partition table. The idea is to blow everything off the hard drive and make one large FAT partition if you use windows fdisk or one large linux and appropriate sized swap partition if you use linux utilities.