sgroy Posted May 15, 2004 Report Share Posted May 15, 2004 Hi everybody, I had installed the beta version or non offical version of Mandrake 10, which caused some serious problems and I was no longer able to boot in Windows. I had to reinstall Windows and go back to MDK 9.2 Can someone tell me if in the official version this has been corrected, because I don;t want thins to happen again and have to reinstall everything? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted May 15, 2004 Report Share Posted May 15, 2004 :D I have been dual/triple/quadruple booting with Mandrake fine. I understand that some people had a problem, and I am not sure that it was specific to Mandrake 10, beta or otherwise. My windex is xppro. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted May 16, 2004 Report Share Posted May 16, 2004 Hi sgroy. I suspect that you did NOT need to reinstall Windows again. You presumed you needed to because you did not understand that often it is the MBR (Master Boot Record) that has been corrupted by not doing the install procedure correctly. This site and most other Linux sites have repeatedly had posts on how to rectify the situation so please do some research. Frankly I have got a little fed up about how this problem keeps coming up because former Windows users ASSUME that it is Linux which has caused the problem and not the user installing incorrectly. I know some fellow MUBers will think this is being a little unfair but I cannot help it after seeing MUBers regularly devoting their valuable time to cases where there is obviously no attempt been made to seek out the answers first to what is a commonly known problem. There is nothing basically wrong with Mandrake 10 CE or OE and how you think you have solved your problem by going back to 9.2 is way beyond me. If you do not understand the importance of or how the MBR works, then I sincerely suggest you read up on the subject and you will save yourself a lot of grief in the future. Until I started with Linux, I didn't know there was such a thing as the MBR. However I had NO Difficulty finding out information about it on the various Linux sites long before I ever had the need to ask for help. Any way don't take this as a personal attack on you because it is not. I am speaking in general terms here and as such applies to many people, now, and in the future. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
linux_learner Posted May 16, 2004 Report Share Posted May 16, 2004 as john indicated there are many documents on this. the master boot record is partially in the bios and partially on the first sector of the master drive. every DOS disk has the option to repair the MBR. fdisk /mbr . with XP, its the recovery console instead of a DOS disk. the command in that is fixmbr . things that can cause the MBR to become corrupted are antivirus software. since they do guard the MBR. if your using XP, then by defualt XP is in NTFS. NTFS does have a bug that was supposed to have been addressed (fixed) in a service pack for NT. the ntfs.drv can load twice on bootup causing the entire filesystem to be unreadable. the system then wont boot, and the recovery console is useless since the entire filesystem is unreadable. this is a fault that can not be blamed on linux, since by default linux does not and can not write to NTFS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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