Guest frank ross Posted January 28, 2007 Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 My first try with Mandriva (2007-64bit)-install and reboot went OK but I was faced with a sea of strange directories. After some thought I realized that Mandriva had mounted partitions on my archive drive (hda), searched out Linux distros from years ago and tried to recreate paths and directories that I haven't used since 2004. To make things worse it would not let me alter the directories with konqueror or as "su" from a terminal. I guess this is a feature to help update installations but is there some way to turn it off and force mandriva to do a "clean" install on my new drive (sda) without mounting old partitions? On the bright side, Mandriva is the first 64 bit distro that I've been able to install at all! Thank you frank Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted January 28, 2007 Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 If I understand you, the directories that Mandriva found must still exist or they would not show up. Remove them from /etc/fstab and they will no longer mount. On the other hand, if you ran an upgrade rather than a clean install, I am not sure what would happen. I do not recommend upgrades, ever. If they are mounted, but you cannot change them as root, you have a real botched install. Incidentally, I have no idea how a 64-bit installation would upgrade a 32-bit installation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverSurfer60 Posted January 28, 2007 Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 During your installation did you elect to use the entire drive for installation, or use existing partitiions? If it was the latter then you would have had the choice of formatting the whole drive or just selected partitoins. In which case you would need to select them as they are not selected as default, just the OS partition. As you were installing a 64-bit version the afore said might be utter jibberish as I have not installed 64-bit myself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted January 28, 2007 Report Share Posted January 28, 2007 If they are mounted, but you cannot change them as root, you have a real botched install. Incidentally, I have no idea how a 64-bit installation would upgrade a 32-bit installation. nope .. you can't change them because they are mounted (you can't change the name of the mountpoint while its mounted) otherwise you are correct... he needs to unmount them first it might be easier to work out what he does want and then umount -a (it should leave /) then remove them from the fstab while unmounted, then delete and dirctories it created to mount them on... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest frank ross Posted January 31, 2007 Report Share Posted January 31, 2007 I've read the replies and it seems that my problems are unique. I have disabled hda in the BIOS and tried several reinstalls with the same results. Once the system is up I get the message "access denied" when I try to umount or delete the unnessary directories or edit fstab (even as su). Mandriva is creating and mounting these directories during the install but I don't seem to have any input into the process. Mandriva also resists letting me log into KDE as root-it may not be good practice all the time but it is helpful to be root to solve installation problems. I took the easy way out and rebooted with Knoppix to edit fstab and rearrange directories, that helped but leads to the next question: is Mandriva meant to be this difficult to work with or am I doing somethiing wrong? thanks again frank Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverSurfer60 Posted January 31, 2007 Report Share Posted January 31, 2007 The way I see this is if you have disabled hda in bios then I can understand access denied as the drive is physically there OS wise it is not. Question is are you set up to boot from hda or your new drive (I assume to be hdb). One can access root from within kde, if you can get that far, as there are functions for partition manipulations in kde. Without manipulating other startup scripts you cannot log into the system with root privileges. I would say Mandriva is no more difficult than any other system when it gets somewhat screwed up. Personally I would be looking at the bootup scripts and either comment out or delete any reference to hda, if that's possible, and your bootup sequence is in fact using your sda drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted January 31, 2007 Report Share Posted January 31, 2007 Without manipulating other startup scripts you cannot log into the system with root privileges. Erm you can either boot into RL 1 fromthe grub/lilo screen OR let it boot then CTRL+ALT+F1 to a tty and init 1 From init 1 you can umount -a then you can edit the fstab... I have disabled hda in the BIOS and tried several reinstalls with the same results. Yes because these entries are already in your boot manager... and the reinstall is trying to find other bootable partitions by reading it... I took the easy way out and rebooted with Knoppix to edit fstab and rearrange directories, that helped but leads to the next question: is Mandriva meant to be this difficult to work with or am I doing somethiing wrong? Not really Mandriva was trying to be overhelpful... In reality what its trying to do is preserve your existing installs... and once you did it once it wrote it to the boot manager and kept finding it.... This is a "feature" of mandriva.... and its not uncommon in its type of hassle it makes... Mandriva strives to be simple ... BUT in doing so it can cause some weird things and usually these weirdnesses are not tested or easily reversible... Overall Mandriva is wizard based... you select a task (using wifi or ADSL or in your base the boot manager) and then it tries to do it all for you with the minimum of questions.... The problem is when it goes wrong its usually a bigger mess than if you did it by hand in the first place. Other distro's do the opposite... like arch or gentoo whenre you read and understand first... Both has advantages and disadvantages.... in this case you were unlucky... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest frank ross Posted February 1, 2007 Report Share Posted February 1, 2007 Thanks for all the help. I think Gowator expresses it well; Mandriva is a bit more automated then I am used to. I'll keep blundering along and see where I get to with it. frank Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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