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Moving from 9.0 to 9.1


Setras
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Hi!

 

Just thought to ask before trying to install 9.1....

 

I heard from a friend that trying to install 9.1 had messed up his bootsector or something, resulting in virtual fat getting messed up and him having to replace his harddrive... Has this happened to anyone? I'm running a IBM Thinkpad 765D (P166, 64 Mb, 3 Gb) and while having to go back to 9.0 if 9.1 doesn't work isn't a problem I rather wouldn't end up having to buy a new HD...

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Say it gets messed up(which is more an exception I think looking at the most complains here: if it was a real problem there should be a lot messages about this...):

 

At the moment that you install mandrake, tou can also type "rescue" instead of installing mandrake...., there is also an option to reinstall the bootloader, or even an only-windowsloader...

 

it's of course up to you...

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Off hand I can't think of a way for Linux to write off a hard drive. Yes if your really un-lucky it might corrupt the partition table, but that is repairable. If the HD really was beyond saving its much more likely it was a hardware failure than Linux.

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if he replaced his hard driver he either 1) jumped the gun or 2) had a failure of the hard drive to to some reason other than installing linux.

 

at the very least, he should have gotten the utilities for his hard drive to give it a quick check. it would have told him how badly it was messed up, if at all.

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I don't know if it was necessary for him to replace the hardrive, nor do I know what exactly happened. What he said is that nothing would boot from the harddrive and replacing the bootmanager or repartioning and formatting and reinstalling wouldn't help...

 

But since it seems fairly safe to assume that there won't be any hardware damage done, I think I'll give it a try...

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Bet he took it to a crooked auto mechanic!

 

The one thing that you have to watch out for when sharing linux and windows on the same drive is that windows doesn't understand linux extended partitions. Win has its own version of extended. This means if you use a windows utility such as fdisk or a disk manager to make changes, you will end up with your partition table going south. This also applies to many 3rd party boot managers.

 

The trick is to use the linux partition manager (diskdrake or fdisk or cfdisk) to make changes. They understand windows extended partitions.

 

If this does happen, then there are various ways to clear your partition table. Usually a manufactorer has a floppy utility that can do it. 3rd party software such as boot managers may have a utility.

 

I say all this from experience because when I got into linux I had one drive and kept hosing everything everytime I added a partition..

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If he was using a boot mamager such as Boot Magic, System Commander or any of the others (of which there are too many), Cannonfodder's remarks above become particularly true. Regardless of the version of Windows being used, the boot managers supplied with Linux (Lilo or Grub) are more than adequate for a dual or even multi-boot install.

 

The problem with 3rd party boot loaders is that they are sometimes hard to remove. If there is a large drive involved, there may have been instructions during its install setup to put a utility such as EZ Drive on the disk. These are designed to fool the bios into thinking this is a larger disk than Windows thinks it is. Short of wiping the drive as Cannonfodder suggests, there is nothing other than a sector editor to remove them.

 

Read the Large Disk How-To in the Dcoumentation section of your main menu and the Partitioning mini-How-To in the Mandrake Doc How To section from the Downloads at the top of the page.

 

Counterspy

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Well, the install went smoothly, and without an incident. That said, maybe this post should be under different topic... Anyway A few questions:

 

Where's emacs? Or pico? There has to be some text-editor I can use in a terminal?

 

What did I need CDs 2 and 3 for? In the installation, I picked English as the main language, but also installed language support for Finnish. Also, I didn't pick individual packages but selected all the other categories under "Client" (or whatever it was) except "Multimedia" and still it only installed stuff from the CD 1?

 

Does the fact that I had Mandrake 9.0 installed before installing 9.1 and that I didn't format my /home partition cause the "MandrakeGalaxy" theme look different from all the screenshots? Or is it not activated by default? Or did it just get overridden by my "old" desktop settings?

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So, it seems the install didn't go without a glitch... It only installed stuff from CD 1. Now, while it "Detects for available packages" it first reads from the CD 1, then the screen flashes and then it "Detects for available packages" again, but nothing happens until it moves onwards to the package selection... Now How do I get the installation program to understand that I have all the 3 CDs and not just CD1?

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In "Configuration/Packaging start "Software Sources Manager" The three CD's should be listed there... if not, you should be able to add them one at a time and that should solve this.

 

Emacs is on one of the discs, but I didn't see pico listed.

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pico is part of pine. Since pine is not in the disks (something about licensing problem I think), you won't get pico unless you download pine rpm from PLF.

What surprised me is that nano is not available. I mean.. nano is GPL isn't it? And it probably only take about what... 1 megabyte of space at most?

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Well, I added CD2 and CD3 as software sources and picked everything I wanted to from the list all/by group list... then it wanted all the 3 CDs one by one and then started to install stuff... only, at that moment it decided I had no free space left on my hard drive. When I started picking stuff I had 1,7 Gb free. Does it copy every package to the hardrive before installing them? and even then, I only picked stuff worth of 998 Mb...

 

Well, whatever the reason, I'm going back to 9.0, atleast I can get it installed with the packages I want...

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