RVDowning Posted September 22, 2005 Report Share Posted September 22, 2005 (edited) Trying to help out a friend who has installed Mandriva 10.1 with XP and uses lilo to dual boot. His problem is as follows: "After exiting Linux and going into XP I get msg that system.log and software.log file sizes are incorrect. Run chkdsk and everything is OK. I don't get the msgs when exiting XP and restarting XP; only when I have been into Linux." I realize this is probably an XP issue, but didn't know if anyone here might have an idea of whether something in Linux could be causing this, or any workaround. Thanks. Edited October 16, 2005 by RVDowning Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wilcal Posted September 22, 2005 Report Share Posted September 22, 2005 Trying to help out a friend who has installed Mandriva 10.1 with XP and uses lilo to dual boot. I suggest staying away from Lilo/Grub to dual boot anything. Get up to speed on: Ranish Partition Manager http://www.ranish.com/part/ You can have as many as 30 seperate and discreet OS's on a single hard disk. Typically I set up 10GB partitions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted September 22, 2005 Report Share Posted September 22, 2005 Well I don't think it's a bootloader issue so I wouldn't go changing lilo/grub. I assume winxp is running on an ntfs filesystem. NTFS partitions are read only in linux and set up that way by default in mandrake. If winxp is on a FAT32 partition, there's some potential for issues since those are read/write. Could you post his /etc/fstab file. Fstab controls the automounting of partitions at boot. There may be something out of whack there in the mounting options or filesystem checks for the winxp partition which causes the winxp error message after linux has mounted the partition. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RVDowning Posted September 24, 2005 Author Report Share Posted September 24, 2005 Sorry for the delayed response. Due to an emergency my buddy had to go out of town for a few days, so I won't be able to get his /etc/fstab for a few more days. I do know that he is operating older gear and is using FAT32. He installed lilo in the default location for 10.1. Is the default the MBR? If so, could that make a difference if it was changed to the / directory? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted September 24, 2005 Report Share Posted September 24, 2005 The default normally is the MBR. I've never attempted an install with Windows on FAT32, all mine have been NTFS so I've never encountered the problem. I wouldn't have thought the location would cause issues. The only issue your likely to encounter is that you probably wouldn't be able to boot Linux if it was put in the wrong place. The MBR is the preferred place for locating lilo, or whichever boot loader you prefer. Some prefer grub, some prefer lilo, but usually always the same place, in the MBR. If you can post the fstab when he returns, that will be cool. We can then see if we can make changes to the fstab to sort out the problems. Otherwise, if that doesn't resolve it, you can always convert the Windows partition to NTFS as he's using XP, but this would be read-only in Linux, whereas FAT32 can be read and written too, so I wouldn't advise this as a solution at present. It's best to leave as FAT32 and see what the fstab file says, because then we can give it a proper solution :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted September 24, 2005 Report Share Posted September 24, 2005 (edited) My Win2000 has always been fat 32. I have never been swayed by the ntfs thing. Probably just another attempt to make Windows incompatible with anything not windows. More secure and stable file system??? I don't think so. Most of the kind of problems I have encountered were when Partition Magic was used to setup the Windows partitions but not the Linux ones. When later I repartitioned the windows partitions using the windows installer itself, then I did not get those kind of messages except for the ocassional times that I mistakenly used Lilo. Like bvc, I have found Lilo to be quite clumsy in the way it does things and have NEVER had boot problems due to Grub, only ever with Lilo. It is best to install the boot loader to the MBR. For those that say setting up grub is much harder for multiple Linux OSs are really telling quite a big fib. Cheers John. Edited September 26, 2005 by AussieJohn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
crazyspongebob Posted September 26, 2005 Report Share Posted September 26, 2005 I think you should delete the line that automount the winXP partition in fstab file. I had the same problem when I warm reboot my box from Mandriva back into winXP. After giving the box a cold hard boot (turning the box off and on), I have no problem at all. J.T. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RVDowning Posted September 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 Well, he's back and his /etc/fstab is listed below: /dev/hda5 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/hda7 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0 /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0 It seems that the problem is actually intermittent. about one time in three when atttempting to enter Windows after having exited Linux the system will hang. The drive light is on solid but nothing seems to be happening. He has to hit system reset a couple of times and then he can boot and take the Windows option. It also turns out he is using grub. I guess it was the default after all. Personally, I am using lilo, but that is because, for some reason, I don't get a graphical display with grub, but I do with lilo. I haven't taken the time to investigate, so I just continue using lilo. We can try removing the automount of windows to see if that removes the problem. If so, we can then try manually mounting it and accessing it both in read and write mode to see if the problem returns. Thanks for the responses. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RVDowning Posted September 29, 2005 Author Report Share Posted September 29, 2005 We're getting some intermittent halts of the system. The problem is kind of moving around. Starting to think that it might be a memory issue. Does anyone know of a good linux memory diagnostic tool? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted September 29, 2005 Report Share Posted September 29, 2005 If you have e.g. a Knoppix CD or another Live-CD (some distros like Fedora have this tool available in the install CD, but not all), you can run Memtest86 from the CD and check the RAM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted September 29, 2005 Report Share Posted September 29, 2005 Going on past experience, I would say that it is most likely faulty memory. The memtest will certainly help determine this but it needs to be left running on test for at least 24 hours. Grub now has a GUI in version Mandriva 2006. Picking Lilo for it having one is unfortunate, in my opinion, since you only see the boot up for only about 1 and a half minutes anyway. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RVDowning Posted October 3, 2005 Author Report Share Posted October 3, 2005 Got zillions of memory errors. Will try new memory and report back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RVDowning Posted October 16, 2005 Author Report Share Posted October 16, 2005 Well, the bad memory was replaced and now he is happily dual booting between XP and Mandriva 2006. memtest86 seems to be a good tool. Other tools had been used and found no errors. Thanks for everyone's help! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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