Mandrake10 install issue

[AussieJohn]

I have just installed Mandrake 10.

 

During the Install setting up, my 2 of 80Gbs Hard Drives namely hda and hdc are identified as hde and hdg respectively. My DVD is hdb and my burner is hdd usually.

 

These are my only 4 IDE drives so where is the hde and hdg coming from???

 

Because of this I was not game to install the bootloader on hda for fear of screwing up my Win2000 so I installed it onto a floppy disc.

 

I have some minor look and feel taste problems to resolve yet but apart form XMMS not playing (startup and close sounds etc are working AOK) everything else seems to be running OK

 

Does anyone know what the go is here with these two aspects i.e. Xmms and the HDD numbers ???. Again thanks in in advance. John

[AussieJohn]

I have reinstalled Mandrake 10 again but find I still have this strange situation that my 4 IDE drives which are normally detected as hda hdb hdc hdd are being detected by M10 as hde hdf hdg hdh.

I have only the 4 drives and have also made certain that the BIOS has SATA and RAID as well as Onboard Sound and LAN are DISABLED.

I have also used my burner drive for the install ( I have found I get next to no problems and instability this way.......found this to be the case mostly on friends machines who have fast but cheap 52X cdrom drives) instead of the cdrom reader drive and did the 21234 install procedure instead of the expected 1234 routine.

In the BIOS I have also selected LBA instead of Auto.

I believe I am doing everything as advised but still can't resolve the matter .

 

A further wierd problem I encountered is when I used Kdiskfree to look at the info there I found that / was full and I knew that shouldn't be the case so I opened MCC to see all the RPMS that were installed and found not just the M10 files as one would expect but ALSO ALL THE MAN9.2 FILES AS WELL. This was despite the fact that during the M10 install, I definately and deliberately selected formatting the esisting / and /home partitions and it seemed to go through the routine OK . I had to labourisly go through and delete all the older version packages ( MCC stopped me from deleting anything that was needed or in use) I was able to delete nearly 600mbs of stuff. I immediately did a dummy upgrade to make sure nothing was broken and it has been running great ever since.

 

I also get error messages if I try to install the boot loader onto the MBR which is usually hda that it does not exist but I installed it on to hde ?? OK. I also cannot install the bootloader on to the floppy drive as fd0, yet the floppy drive works normally in M10.

 

The two CD drives are shown on the desktop as hdf and hdh respectively.

 

I notice that the shortcut for the USB Scanner no longer appears on the Desktop. Is that a Mandrake change??? The Scanner works perfectly alone with XSANE or through the GIMP.

 

I am using a new MainBoard, the ASUS A7V600-X ( my A7N8X-Deluxe has an intermittent fault.............won't boot the BIOS).

 

Hello BVC. Do I think Mandrake 10 is a Lemon ??? I certainly do not. Congratulations, by the way, on still doing a good job at helping people with their problems. I certainly admire you for that.

 

Here's hoping someone has some possible answers for me. Cheers.

[scoopy]

Any chance you got any other partitions you may or may not have forgotten about on your drives? Such as a system backup partition you get with OEM win setups. How about a card reader? They should be sdb and sdc, but maybe got confused with hdx.?

 

BTW: I am happy with 10 CE

[bvc]

Hi AussieJohn, :o

very weird! YUK!

 

can you post the output of (as root)

ls /boot

ls /

ls /mnt

cat /proc/version

cat /proc/partitions

and whatever mandrakes version text is in /etc.....something like

cat /etc/mandrake.version

or something. In debian and suse it's

debian:~# cat /etc/debian_version

testing/unstable

debian:~# cat /suse/etc/SuSE-release

SuSE Linux 9.0 (i586)

VERSION = 9.0

debian:~#

 

and your

/etc/fstab

and

/boot/device.map (? in suse with grub it's /boot/grub/device.map but if I remember rt lilo uses one and it's in /boot)

 

No, 10-CE is not a lemon, it's an rc and not final. Simple as that. :D

Edited March 21, 2004 by bvc

[AussieJohn]

Thanks scoopy for your suggestion. But NO, M10 first detects the drives then looks at the partitions.

Hello BVC. After my earlier post I decided to carefully watch the booting up data as it scrolled through and noticed for the first time that it said somthing like 'starting raid" and then it listed the four drives. Now I knew positively that I had DISABLED the onboard RAID in the BIOS so I went to the ASUS website to see if there were any updates for the A7V600-X board and found there were none but out of curiousity I decided to look at the frequently asked questions and found one about disabling RAID on this particular mainboard. What it said was that due too limitations of the chipset, RAID COULD NOT BE DISABLED. Those Lying, cheating bas...ds at ASUS have pulled a con. Making the setting in the BIOS does nothing, The RAID is running all the time. There is no mention of any of this in the Manual or in the promotional material. Obviously crappy Windoze can't tell the difference because it didn't effect it. M10 on the other hand can now be seen to be detecting correctly as it sees the situation. It sees the four devices on the two IDE cables as part of a RAID setup. ASUS is at fault here just like LG was with the CDROM drive fiasco.

 

If you know someone in MandrakeSoft you can feel free to copy this post to them, they may just come up with a work-around somehow. Maybe an install patch to ignore the RAID detection or something like that.

 

Because of this condition, I found that even though I had selected reformatting of /boot and / and also /home during the install and it appeared to have done so before proceeding further with the install, I was surpried to find that when I went into my account all my preferences were already there. Suspecting something fishy, I opened up Kdiskfree and discovered / was 100% full although the total install size would only take up half of its partition.

Into MCC and to package manager uninstalls. Sure enough all the original Mand9.2 RPMs were in there. I deleted all older versions and MCC stopped me when it had to to prevent me breaking anything . I removed nearly 600Mbs and immediately did a dummy upgrade to ensure all would be OK and so it was. Earlier when I was doing the post install setting up, I tried to put the bootloader on the hda mbr but got a message no such drive so I gambled and put it on the mbr of hde and it worked and has done ever since.

 

Please let me know if this info is of use for MandrakeSoft or other users of this particular board.

I am just about fed up with ASUS. I think they have just lost a customer . I cannot tolerate cheats. Good to hear from you BVC. Cheers

[bvc]

Hmmm....well I can say this.....I have never had raid of any sort and have always gotten that 'starting raid' and boot. So that is not unusual. What is is that the mdk 2.6 kernel seems to be trying to use it even though it is disabled in the bios. I'm not sure that is even the case, but I know nothing about raid other than what it does.

 

What about plugNplay in the bios? Do you have a setting to turn all pNp off? Or like mine, a section with subsections to config pNp hardware individually? Is all pNp options off?

 

I don't know anyone at mdk. You can bet they read this board though :lol: Hopefully they'll see it. I say this because for me no other distro starts raid, every kernel, every release, even when you do not have it :lol: So, either mdk is and is doing something to their kernels for this to happen, or it's just a message being spit out by a bootup script and not really trying to start raid. Either way, something is not right.

 

So now you've done a clean install, formating everything and have no 9.2 data/pkgs on the partitions, right?

 

I'd still be interested to see the output of

cat /proc/partitions

[AussieJohn]

Thanks BVC.

Yes I have all Plug-n Play disabled in the BIOS. Learnt that one the hard way 2 yrs ago.

 

Here is the printout that you requested :-

[root@localhost john]# cat /proc/partitions

major minor #blocks name

 

1 0 32000 ram0

1 1 32000 ram1

1 2 32000 ram2

1 3 32000 ram3

1 4 32000 ram4

1 5 32000 ram5

1 6 32000 ram6

1 7 32000 ram7

1 8 32000 ram8

1 9 32000 ram9

1 10 32000 ram10

1 11 32000 ram11

1 12 32000 ram12

1 13 32000 ram13

1 14 32000 ram14

1 15 32000 ram15

33 0 78150744 hde

33 1 3590496 hde1

33 3 1 hde3

33 5 24587451 hde5

33 6 8329671 hde6

33 7 248976 hde7

33 8 48163 hde8

33 9 4088479 hde9

33 10 1807281 hde10

33 11 3646723 hde11

33 12 17486721 hde12

33 13 11269566 hde13

33 14 3044286 hde14

34 0 78150744 hdg

34 1 112423 hdg1

34 3 1 hdg3

34 5 3325423 hdg5

34 6 24820393 hdg6

34 7 31840798 hdg7

34 8 1148616 hdg8

34 9 13374081 hdg9

34 10 554211 hdg10

34 11 2971993 hdg11

[root@localhost john]#

(thanks for telling me where to get it, it made it very easy as a result)

 

There is one oddity that I didn't mention earlier because it did not seem to be relative but now I am not so sure. I have MAN10 installed on both WD 80 Gb hard drives. The first HDD has W2000 Pro and Mandrake10, the second HDD has Man10 alone . When I did these two installs, I had a Promise Ultra66 card running a WD 8.4Gb HDD. It was not detected. It ran ok with Man9.1 and 9.2 and with Windows. Because it was no longer important to my use, I removed it. I suspect that it not being detected was symptomatic of the problem rather than being a problem in itself.

 

I plan to do a fresh reinstall, without the Ultra66 card, on the the first hard drive (hda) and see if this makes any difference. This is not so hard since I saved the packages selections onto Floppy and I do not have any particular preferences set up on this one.

 

I will let you know as soon as I've done it.

 

Thanks mate. Cheers

[Kjel Oslund]

I'm running on an ASUS A7V600 (but not the A7V600-X) and I installed 10CE about 2 weeks ago, replacing a 9.2 install. I've had no problems running 10CE and only noticed a day after the install, when I went to edit /etc/fstab to add some loopbacks for the ISOs, that my IDE drives were not the usual hda/hdb but were hde/hdf.

 

The A7V600 has support for both serial and parallel IDE. Without looking further into this, I would guess that the kernel sees the serial-ATA channels as hd{a,b,c,d} and the parallel IDE channels at hd{e,f,g,h}. Its interesting that the drive links in /dev/ide are on host2. I don't think I saw that *2* in previous releases.

[Kjel Oslund]

Just checked my boot messages. Yes, the SATA control is first and has the hd{a,b,c,d} channels:

 

VIA8237SATA: 100%% native mode on irq 9

ide0: BM-DMA at 0xa000-0xa007, BIOS settings: hda:pio, hdb:pio

ide1: BM-DMA at 0xa008-0xa00f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio

VP_IDE: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:0f.1

 

VP_IDE: VIA vt8237 (rev 00) IDE UDMA133 controller on pci0000:00:0f.1

ide2: BM-DMA at 0x9400-0x9407, BIOS settings: hde:DMA, hdf:DMA

ide3: BM-DMA at 0x9408-0x940f, BIOS settings: hdg:DMA, hdh:DMA

 

 

So, you should be able to ignore the name changes and raid settings as a source of your other problems.

[AussieJohn]

Thanks Kjel. This is becoming interesting, isn't it??

Now we have more people looking at this one.

I guess there is more to come. Cheers