Replicator Posted June 28, 2004 Report Share Posted June 28, 2004 what is the current situation/setup? BVC is your question is to me here is my answer: Current situation: I have two box one old to TEST and one new, every time I put a distro in my new machine I Test in the old in order to check that everything is ok, in this case FC2 is not working and I have the same problem that most users have with dualboot with WinXP. Setup: I setup the HD of my old machine using one tip of this forum: SETUP The old machine is a 500 Mghz Pentiun with 256 RAM and a 30 GB hardrive, according to some reviews I can install FC2 in this machine without any problem, and in order to install FC2 in my new machine I need to run in my old PC I really don´t want any problem over there. My new machine have a MSI K7 Motherboard with AMD XP 2500 processor, 512 MB RAM, MSI 5600 with 256 Ram is the videocard, running XP and Mandrake without any problem. One point here is that both machine have Nvidia videocards, FC2 recognize the old videocard, and mandrake didn´t recognize the new one, that for the Nvidia driver (not opensource) According to the setup of my old machine what is the best soluttion to install FC2, I download already the Rescue Disc but I really don´t know is this FIX my problem. I know that most of you here are JEDIS using Linux please help this poor PADAWAN... B) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted June 28, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 28, 2004 The solution to this problem is very simple, but it may confuse people because most people will question why they are seeing strange values reported from their partition table in CHS format. If you do not trust this solution or your ability to follow these steps then you should stop and seek hard disk recovery consulting services. The Fedora Project is in no way liable for any data loss and this guide is offered without guarantees. You are taking responsibility for what happens. Now, let us go through the solution. You've been warned Run the following from Fedora, I "assume" that your hd is "HDA" if it is something like "hdb" "hdc" "hdd" "sda" sdb" then change it. 1.) su - <--- enter root passwd 2.) sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda For info of what the commad does. So that the reader may better understand what is going on here, lets go through what each section does and what the parameters mean. sfdisk -d /dev/hda This part runs sfdisk non-interactively and dumps the partition table in a format that sfdisk can also use for input (as we are doing). Try this command by itself to see your partition table as it is very safe. You will want to check to check for warnings in the output. Warnings pose a problem because they interfere with the use of this data as input. Output containing a warning may look like the example below: $ sfdisk -d /dev/hda Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary. DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently. # partition table of /dev/hda unit: sectors /dev/hda1 : start= 63, size= 16771797, Id= 7, bootable /dev/hda2 : start= 16771860, size=217632555, Id= f /dev/hda3 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0 /dev/hda4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0 /dev/hda5 : start= 16771923, size=104856192, Id= 7 /dev/hda6 : start=121628178, size=112776237, Id= 7 For reasons unknown, using the option -- quiet does not suppress all warnings so it becomes the task of the user to discover a way to still use the output as input. The simplest way is to write the output to a plain text file, editing out the warning in that text file, and using the edited text file as the input, thus: sfdisk -d /dev/hda > MyPartitionTable.txt editing MyPartitionTable.txt to remove the warnings, saving the edited text, and cat MyPartitionTable.txt | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda The output from "sfdisk -d /dev/hda" should begin like this (this is the edited version of the example given before): # partition table of /dev/hda unit: sectors /dev/hda1 : start= 63, size= 16771797, Id= 7, bootable /dev/hda2 : start= 16771860, size=217632555, Id= f /dev/hda3 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0 /dev/hda4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0 /dev/hda5 : start= 16771923, size=104856192, Id= 7 /dev/hda6 : start=121628178, size=112776237, Id= 7 Note that "cat MyPartitionTable.txt" takes the place of "sfdisk -d /dev/hda" as these are now equivalent. In this case the warning portion has been stripped, preserving the needed data used by sfdisk in step two of the command. sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda This portion of the two-part command performs the actual change to your hard disk. This main operation is in -H255. This tells sfdisk to write a head count of 255 into the drive geometry. This command executed by itself would ask for user input of the partition table (just like fdisk). However, by piping the table we just read in the first command, this is avoided and work is saved and we know the data is correct (or, at least, unchanged). This is why sfdisk is used. The --no-reread option allows the command to run even when the disk has a mounted partition. Some users may find they need to further force the operation to complete. This is done by using --force (sfdisk --no-reread --force -H255 /dev/hda). In this example we are only changing the number of heads in the geometry. If you know the correct number of cylinders before the Fedora Core installation changed these values you may also write back this number. An example with 14,593 cylinders is provided below. sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 -C14593 /dev/hda The number of reported sectors (S) should not have changed and remained as 63. This is the part most likely to be met with the question "if I change the number of heads, must I not also change the the number of cylinders?" The answer to this question is "no." When the geometry was changed the number of heads changed from 255 to 16 and the number of cylinders was increased to compensate. As long as the values are large everything should be ok. Only the pedantic need worry about changing the number of cylinders manually. If you do not know the value from before you are best off not supplying this number. By using this method there is no need, and indeed you should not, run a program that wipes the MBR (like fdisk /mbr). Doing so will cause you to lose the Grub pointer installed in the MBR and you will have to use the Recovery CD to regain access to your Fedora Core installation. Updating Grub after installation seems to have no effect on the drive geometry as the problem seems strictly limited to the Fedora Core installer. Good luck and join us on the IRC at #fedora on irc.freenode.net for any questions you have or contributions to the community you wish to make. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FX Posted June 28, 2004 Report Share Posted June 28, 2004 cybr I ran that command on the wifes machine and it didn't fix anything. On here, the laptop, I could still boot into Windows with no problem, but when I ran PM8 or tried too, it would error out with a 117 code. "Drive letters are unreconizable" or something close to that. I also installed with the "linux hda=blah" command so it would use the right geometry and things still got hosed up. Its depressing for me cause I am really a RH/Fedora fan you anyone in #musb will tell ya that, but geez this last release is just, well not good. Sorry, but it should have never been released under those circumstances. FX Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted June 28, 2004 Report Share Posted June 28, 2004 again, what is really amazing is that is stays that way in iso....new iso's please....is what I say. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted June 28, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 28, 2004 I agree with bvc, if there is a problem with the release, make a new iso and label it 2.1 or something. Don't know why they don't? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Replicator Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 I have this message on screen: GNU GRUB version 0.94 (640K lower / 3072K upper memory) [ Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible completions of a device/filename. ] grub> This message is related with the dualboot problem between FC2 and WinXP??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 are you just trying to get back to xp? Is this what you get at boot after doing; sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda ? if 'yes' to all of the above, then boot with the xp cd and do a Recovery in Console>choose the xp drive letter>enter the admin password and do fixboot fixmbr exit take out the cd. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Replicator Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 are you just trying to get back to xp? Is this what you get at boot after doing;sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda ? if 'yes' to all of the above, then boot with the xp cd and do a Recovery in Console>choose the xp drive letter>enter the admin password and do fixboot fixmbr exit take out the cd. No I get this message when I finish the installation of FC2 when the machine boot Grub put this message in the screen. I press "TAB" like the label said but nothing happen. I try installing 3 times and always the same. In order to boot into WinXP again I put my Win disk and delete the linux partitions, i have tyhe following setup: In one harddrive: 1 partitions NTFS Full format for WinXP, a huge partition in FAT32 for both OS, and the third one is free space for linux to create his own partition, the bootloader is located in the MBR, that all, anything wrong with this setup, I take this for a tip right here in the forum. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 That should be a fine setup. Do you have lba set for the hd in the bios? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Replicator Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 That should be a fine setup. Do you have lba set for the hd in the bios? I need to check the LBA set, I let you know.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted June 29, 2004 Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 I agree with bvc, if there is a problem with the release, make a new iso and label it 2.1 or something. Don't know why they don't? OT....but I haven't read up enough to know if there's an actual reason, but....why do they keep pumping out 4STACK kernels? So many have nvidia and need 8STACK...duh!....they really need to wake up already. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted June 29, 2004 Author Report Share Posted June 29, 2004 I agree with bvc, if there is a problem with the release, make a new iso and label it 2.1 or something. Don't know why they don't? OT....but I haven't read up enough to know if there's an actual reason, but....why do they keep pumping out 4STACK kernels? So many have nvidia and need 8STACK...duh!....they really need to wake up already. If you notice, most of the time when rh comes out with a new version, nvidia follows along with a new driver. Think back with rh8, 9, fc1 and now fc2. rh is the moster that controls the machine. :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted July 1, 2004 Author Report Share Posted July 1, 2004 Whats the chance of that? nvidia-1.0-6106 Linux Display Driver - IA32 Version: 1.0-6106 Operating System: Linux IA32 Release Date: June 30, 2004 Release Highlights * Added support for GeForce 6800 series of GPUs * Added support for PCI-Express * Added support for GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language). * Added support for GL_EXT_pixel_buffer_object. * Fixed problem that prevented 32-bit kernel driver from running on certain AMD64 CPUs. * Added support for ACPI * Added support for 4kstack kernels. * Added configuration utility "nvidia-settings". For details, see the user guide * Added a shell script "nvidia-bug-report.sh" that gathers system configuration information into a log file; the resulting log file (nvidia-bug-report.log) should be included when reporting bugs to NVIDIA. * Added a new Xv adaptor on GeForce4 and GeForce FX which uses the 3D engine to do Xv PutImage requests. * View the README (Text Version) for more information on this release. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FX Posted July 1, 2004 Report Share Posted July 1, 2004 Too bad Fedora can't be like nvidia and fix or patch their product when they know they need too. FX :still mad: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted July 1, 2004 Author Report Share Posted July 1, 2004 /me thinks it is still rh's evil (or good) plan to wipe out windows and save the user. :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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