bikeman Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 Booted up mandrake one cd. Tried the live install. Selected a non-windows partition for the install. After install finsished my pc would no longer boot because Mandrake one had wiped out my lilo and deleted my Windows 98 MBR. Managed to get windows back by restoring the MBR. Still lunux-less... Not very newb friendly is it? Why is it so difficult to create a linux distro which actually installs as a dual boot correctly? Please make it work, or you'll never get us newbs to switch from windowz... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neddie Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 Which version of "Mandrake one" did you install? Do you mean "Mandriva one"? 2006? 2007? I installed Mandrake onto a Windows machine and it went very smoothly - did it ask you about lilo and your MBR and if so what did you specify? When you say it "wiped out your lilo" do you mean that you already had lilo before, and when you installed Mandriva it removed lilo?? Please make it work, or you'll never get us newbs to switch from windowz...Noone here can "make it work", but we can try to help you to get it working! ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 Using the live-CD (Mandriva ONE or any other live-CD) you can fix the bootloader problem quite easily. We are here for helping you with such things, just give us some info on your hardware and partitions. One note: Many users have installed Mandriva ONE / Mandriva on their computers and immediately had a working dual-boot system. It is not that often that the bootloaders don't install properly. And welcome aboad. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 Linux issues don't include the PEBKAC ones- at least not officially... And yes, what's that "Mandrake One"? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 Must have been Mandriva One, since Mandrake One never existed! :o Key thing to remember, at the end of the install READ the summary screen. Any red items will cause problems on reboot, so make sure they are configured. Also, make sure lilo is installed to MBR and nowhere else. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeman Posted September 17, 2006 Author Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 is it 2007 already? i tried to install the latest version of mandriva one - downloaded yesterday. i have 3 partitions 1=windows 98 2=mandrake linux 3=user linux i answered the questions to install on part 2 it never asked me anything at all about lilo, grub, dual boot etc it just went right ahead and installed - i thought from the lack of questions it had seen my current setup and assumed correctly that i wanted dual boot. my comment 'please make it work' really implies how can mandriva one have such a poor install routine? i believe my setup is very typical of a windows user who wants to try a dual boot. I am just surprised that the install failed so badly. how do i sort out the bootloader? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 Mandriva 2007 is still in cooker (= not yet released). If you got a good copy of Mandriva One, then it actually has a working installer that sets up dual-boot. I remember however that there was a cooker-beta release of One where setting up a bootloader failed. Are you sure you downloaded the correct one? For setting up the booloader, the information you gave us is not enough. Please fire up the live-cd, then type in a terminal (=black monitor icon) as root user fdisk -l you should get something similar to this: Disk /dev/hdc: 80.0 GB, 80060424192 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9733 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdc1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux /dev/hdc2 14 1288 10241437+ 83 Linux /dev/hdc3 1289 1543 2048287+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/hdc4 1544 9733 65786175 5 Extended /dev/hdc5 1544 9733 65786143+ 83 Linux Once you know which partition is the "/" partition (=root), mount the drive as root/superuser/administrator mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt Once this is done, chroot into the system chroot /mnt Now reinstall the bootloader lilo -V /dev/hdc or (if using grub) grub-install /dev/hdc (replace hdc with your partition code, most probably hda). If you don't get an error message, reboot the system and it should run. If it fails installing the bootloader, which error message do you get? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeman Posted September 17, 2006 Author Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 The version I have is the official download as obtained yesterday. I logged in as root (not sure what you meant by root/superuser/administrator) and did as suggested as you can see below I ended up with a 'cant find' when trying to mount hda5... [root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l Disk /dev/hda: 8622 MB, 8622931968 bytes 240 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1113 cylinders Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 = 7741440 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 677 5118088+ b W95 FAT32 /dev/hda2 678 1113 3296160 5 Extended /dev/hda5 678 909 1753888+ 83 Linux /dev/hda6 910 956 355288+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/hda7 957 1113 1186888+ 83 Linux [root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/hda5/mnt mount: can't find /dev/hda5/mnt in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab [root@localhost ~]# Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 [root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/hda5/mnt mount: can't find /dev/hda5/mnt in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab [root@localhost ~]# No wonder. :D You forgot a space. mount /dev/hda5 [space] /mnt this reads as: mount /device/harddisk-A,partition5 at mountpoint /mnt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeman Posted September 17, 2006 Author Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 ok, i mount'd hda5 then stumbled at the next step.. [root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/hda5 /mnt [root@localhost ~]# chroot /mnt chroot: cannot run command `/bin/bash': No such file or directory [root@localhost ~]# chroot/mnt bash: chroot/mnt: No such file or directory [root@localhost ~]# tried both with and without a space.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 Oh, this is a bit ... unlucky. I guess some files of proc are missing. Try solving this by launching as root mount -t proc none /mnt/proc before you chroot into the system. If that fails, then I doubt that your install media was okay and that the installation was 100% okay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeman Posted September 17, 2006 Author Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 not sure what you meant so i just carried on and as you can see it didn't work.. is this what you meant to do? [root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/hda5 /mnt [root@localhost ~]# chroot /mnt chroot: cannot run command `/bin/bash': No such file or directory [root@localhost ~]# chroot/mnt bash: chroot/mnt: No such file or directory [root@localhost ~]# mount -t proc none /mnt/proc mount: mount point /mnt/proc does not exist [root@localhost ~]# Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bikeman Posted September 17, 2006 Author Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 arctic r u there? why the problem getting this to work? are claims that linux is ready for mass adoption somewhat premature? i think it is going to take a lot more than a windows gui to get linux adopted by the mainstream. perhaps it is time for me to try another distro or go back to windows? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 arctic r u there? why the problem getting this to work? are claims that linux is ready for mass adoption somewhat premature? i think it is going to take a lot more than a windows gui to get linux adopted by the mainstream. perhaps it is time for me to try another distro or go back to windows? Well he told you to mount -t proc none /mnt/proc "before you chroot into the system. If that fails, then I doubt that your install media was okay and that the installation was 100% okay. " We are trying to run through this sytematically. If you have no /proc then the chroot will fail. The second part is that there may have been a download error or burning error on the install. That is the live part owrks but the CD has a fault somewhere.... This seems to happen quite often with the burning if its done at full speed.... and sometimes a .iso might be corrupted in download but its usually burning it too fast because a single error will screw up the install... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted September 17, 2006 Report Share Posted September 17, 2006 I am here. Basically it should work if you follow my advice step by step. Please answer the following questions: what do you get when you type uname -a ? Please post it as the kernel number in there will reveal if you downloaded a working, stable release of if you accidently downloaded a development version. Also: When you downloaded the iso-image, did you verify that the iso matched the md5sum check (thus preventing a corrupt download)? Restoring the bootloader with the live-cd is not as easy as with the normal install-CDs, I admit. If you have the normal install CDs, you simply pop in the 1st CD, start rescue mode, select "reinstall bootloader" and that's it. So, if Mandriva One is too problematic, either try the default install set (3 CDs) or try another distro like Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Fedora or whatever you think might be useful for you. (take the distroquiz: http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/) Linux is ready for mass adoption (otherwise millions of users wouldn't use it), but every operating system is only as good as the hardware you throw at it and the knowledge the user posesses about an operating system. Whenever you use an operating system, you have to learn how it works. This is the same in Linux, Mac and Windows. Or did you know everything about Windows the first day you tested it? ;) edit: Oh, Gowator was faster :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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