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Stuck in DOS


Guest SoldierofHyrule
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Greets!

 

Call it the command line, rather than DOS, although linux does have a disk operating system, just not an ibm/microsoft lable!

 

If you put your boot disk into the drive and you arrive at a command line, I'm not sure what you are doing! So, are you installing Mandrake? Is there an os already on the computer? Did you download and burn the cd's? More info please.

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Guest SoldierofHyrule

Yes im trying to install Mandrake, i have Windows XP already on my computer and yes i downloaded the things and burned them to cd's but when i put the first disk in it takes me to the command line and nothing happens and i dont know how to make it start installing.

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i am testifying to soldierofhyrule here that there is absolutely nothing wrong with his self-burnt, diy, iso-cd-rom. i encountered the same problem with my iso-cd. it looks as if mandrake's broken the rule, the rule of making things simple. it has gone off the tangient & done something off the left-field, something wierd with the 10.1 release. with previous rc's, u get a step-by-step graphical interface when u pop in the iso-cd. but with this latest release, mandrake start u off with a dos prompt from caldera. which to me, comes as a complete shocker. i thought at first i had messed up my iso-burning. common sense told me there was something wrong with the ftp site. someone hacked in & uploaded this joke file. so i destroyed it & threw it in the bin & proceeded to burn the 2nd from a different ftp site. needless to say same thing happened. i tried dir/w & opened 1 or 2 .exe files but could make no sense out of it. which brings me here. i'm trying to find out what i should do here. 4 the mo, i'm reverting back 2 using 10.0

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no, it's not a linux command prompt. ls, md, rd, cd, cp, logout, startx, shutdown -h now, tar zxvf, rpm -Uvh.......NONE OF THEM WORK.

but it does respond to dir, cd/.... all those dos commands.

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Well, I'm guessing that you need to be sure that the cdrom device is a boot device in the bios. Try that first and reboot with the Mandrake disk in the drive.

 

Mandrake 10.1 does boot with the graphic loader that they have been developing since 9.0 (?) If you do not get a graphic boot, other reasons could be ram or video issues with your hardware. The first cd is a bootable disk that loads a linux environment for installation purposes. The graphic install for Mandrake has been around since 7.0.

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Guest SoldierofHyrule
One quesation, does it take you to the linux comand line as everyone here is assuming, or does it ACTUALY take you to dos?  That is a remote possablity.  If you're not sure, just post what the prompt says.

 

im pretty sure its DOS seeing as to the left of where you type the commands it says [DR DOS] and thats all it says.

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If you are getting a true DOS promt as you describe, the problem is NOT mandrake, it's either your ISO's or your PC. Period. End of discussion. No question. No doubt. No alternative. No way. No how. No if. No and. No but.

 

NOw that that's out of the way, let's try and figure out what IS going on.

 

To answer one question that came up, no Caldera is not a linux distro, it is a software company. They have in the past, produced a linux distro, but they have also produced a DOS clone called caldera dr-dos.

 

The most likely explanations are:

1. Bad ISO's downloading again does not preclude this possability.

2. Bad burn. Once again, a second burn doesn't fix this, if the cause is human error. You may be doing something stupid like burning the iso as a file isntead of an image and telling nero to make it a boot disk, giving you a basic dos prompt. That's m,y suspician.

3. You may have some other boot media present and have your bios configured to boot it before the CD. Not real likely, but sometimes, it's the REALY obvious things that are most insidious.

4. The last possability that comes to mind is that you have a REALY non-standard bios.

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