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How to - 9.2 to 10CE or Official


SteveAmbrose
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What happens when someone doesn't listen to his instincts and goes ahead and partitions his drive without scanning and defragging first, literally chopping windows into two pieces so it's unable to load itself?

 

I split my existing windows partition into two, the origional partition starting at 0 and going to half way, and another new partition starting from half way and going straight to the end, using efdisk.exe. Of course, only after I realised that I was just chopping up my data by doing this, and I messed up my partition table... my computer is unable to start up, getting just past the ThinkPad splash screen and then staying at a blinking cursor.

 

No, I didn't make an emergency partition recovery diskette, or a boot disk, or anything. My floppy drive is shot.

 

I don't have the original recovery CDs for my laptop, as it was bought off e-Bay. *ouch*

 

I need some method of restoring my computer. My guess is, I need some sort of bootable CD? I can't get access to a DOS prompt even. Somebody must have some method of restoring my laptop. Thanks.

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What happens when someone doesn't listen to his instincts and goes ahead and partitions his drive without scanning and defragging first, literally chopping windows into two pieces so it's unable to load itself?

 

I don't have the original recovery CDs for my laptop, as it was bought off e-Bay. *ouch*

 

It is ashame what happened to your laptop. In my instructions I had this statement:

4. Do you have your installation disks for your Windows OS? If yes, then follow the instructions provided.

 

The purpose for this was to avoid your situation. There are 2 solutions to your problem that come to mind.

 

1. Install linux from the cds without having windows on the laptop

2. Buy a copy of windows OS

 

Not sure what you meant by "doesn't listen to his instincts and goes ahead and partions his drive without scanning and defragging" I explain all of this in this mini how to:

 

6. Install Windows XP

I do not have a copy of Windows XP, only the restore disks that came with the computer. I had tried creating a NTFS partition and forcing the restore to only use that partition but have had no luck. I finally gave up on trying to force it to restore my laptop to the partition I created, and let it have its way with the 20 gig hard drive. After the system restored, I then deleted all the bundled software that I did not want. I then went through the updates, etc. I then installed the programs that I would use in the XP environment. After that, I ran the scandisk utility. When it finished and found no errors, I ran the defrag utility. After this process, I checked to see how much space my XP utilized. With my installed programs, I had used right at 4.7 gb. Next was the decision of how much to dedicate to my XP system. I finally resolved to giving windows 9 gb of room total. That would leave me roughly 11 gb for linux. An important note to remember is this. Once you have run the defrag utility, DO NOT use your XP system until you install your Mandrake system!! Right now, everything is compact and as close together as possible. If you have used the system or added files or programs, run the defrag utility again. The last thing you should do in XP or any Windows OS before logging out to start installation of another OS is to run the defrag utility.

 

 

Will do what I can to help you out but need more info as what model laptop, installed components, etc.

 

Regards, Steve

Edited by SteveAmbrose
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Guest Colin

This is indeed a very good tutorial, this give hope for me to use Mandrake 10. Actually I have no intention to upgrade to 10 as I have read too much problems on install mdk 10, as specially the dual boot issue with Windows.

 

The reason why I want to upgrade to 10 is because reviews shows that kernels 2.6 has a much better performance than 2.4. Due to my work (I'm a research student doing some programming), I need to study about the performance of a software that I'm going use as a part of my research. This software is used under Linux, and hence, I want to test its performance under kernel 2.4 and 2.6.

 

I have about 6 years experience in doing programming under linux environment, but still I'm not so familiar with linux... I don't know how to classify myself, a newbie or more than a newbie??? (But of cause, I'm not an expert on linux)

 

OK, let's get back to the main topic. As I don't want to disturb my working environment (my office machine is a dual boot one with redhat 9 and winxp installed), I decide to upgrade to mdk 10 on my home PC. My home PC has a mdk 9.2 installed (Though I don't use it frequently as I play games at home more frequently~). Based on your tutorial, I have a question about the partition problem.

 

In the very beginning, I know I am making a dual boot machine, I leave rooms for my linux. My hardisk is a maxtor 120GB one. I do the partition within the setup of Windows XP. I leave a 10GB space without any partition. (As this is my "new" computer for about half year.). And then I install the mdk 9.2 by making use of that free space and so that 10GB is directly go to Ext3 partition. Therefore I didn't do any of your defragment and scanning process before installing both OS. And now, this computer is full of data and I don't have anywhere I can backup all them.

 

Actually I know that I could compile the kernel myself to 2.6, but I have tried in the past compiling the kernel myself, and unfortunately, I failed..... Moreover, even if I do that successfully, I think I would lost the update support from Mandrake.

 

So, before I try to upgrade to mandrake 10, I would like to know is it possible to do the upgrade smoothly (I mean booting back to my windows without any problem) under my situation?

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