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DVD ISO download stalls at 3.99 gigs? [solved]


Paul Goelz
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When you do the clean install, if you do have data in /home that you want to keep, then you can leave this and just format the other partitions such as swap and /. Hopefully your /home directory is separate from / to allow you to do this.

 

If you do clean install, make at least three partitions. One for swap, one for / and one for /home and you'll be OK. Mandriva 2007.0 should have been OK to 2008.0 but you never know. If it's still causing you problems, do the clean install as you'll be much better off.

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Since I am still using Windows for all actual "work", I never bothered to put my home folder on a separate partition. There isn't anything in there that I don't want to lose. In fact, the only things I was trying to save were my Windows program installs that I got working under Wine, but I guess it is possible that they would work better after a clean install and upgrade of Wine to the latest version AFTER the clean install? I don't yet have a handle on how well Linux handles upgrades to programs during / after an OS upgrade.

 

Paul

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OK, the upgrade didn't work out at all. Each time I tried, it would get well into the process and then throw an error about a package that "caused an error". When I told it to skip the package (a different one each time, and several hours into the process), it would continue and then eventually freeze. So I gave up and did a clean install.

 

The clean install went smoothly with no errors. However, although I specifically told it to put the grub on the first sector of hdb5 (where Mandriva lives and the way the previous install of Mandriva was set up) it apparently overwrote the mbr of hda1 (Windows, and where I had grub previously installed via PCLinuxOS). In so doing it also missed the fact that PCLinuxOS was installed on hdb6 so all I could boot was Mandriva and Windows. Fortunately, I made a floppy a while back that allows me to boot PCLinuxOS as well as Windows so it was simple to start PCLinuxOS, add the Mandriva entries (copied from the Mandriva version of menu.lst) and re-write the hda1 mbr. Been there, done that..... many times. It is one of the things I would most like to see improved under Linux..... setting up a multiple boot scenario should NOT be as hard as it can be. In my experience, each flavor of Linux seems to do it a little differently and so far, none have gotten it entirely right.

 

Bottom line is that Mandriva is up and running and my system boots correctly. Now on to my next hurdle..... getting my Ralink RT61 wireless card working. I know it can be done because it works under PCLinuxOS. No go yet in Mandriva. But that is for another thread......

 

Thanks for the help here.

 

Paul

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The grub thing is common when booting multiple distros. The only way you can get around this is by using a shared /boot directory for both Linux distros. Alternatively, add the Mandriva item to the other grub config that you want to have as the boot loader, and then you'll be able to boot all three nice and easy.

 

I find it strange that Mandriva overwrite the mbr even when it was told to use the / partition to save the boot loader information. But, I guess these things just happen, no matter what we want to tell it to do :)

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Interesting idea about the /boot directory. I'll remember that.

 

Out of curiosity, why is it that Grub can't add other Linux installs but it can add Windows? In my experience, it ALWAYS gets Windows right. But it doesn't always get other Linux installs right. In this case, it missed PCLinuxOS totally. From PCLinuxOS, it got Mandriva but got the partition numbers wrong. When I would correct the partition numbers (using either hda1 format or hd1,0 format), it would "correct" my entry when it wrote it to the MBR.... and screw it up again. This only happens if I try to edit the partition numbers from the GUI. If I simply open the GUI and tell it to write the MBR, it doesn't change menu.lst. The only way I could get it right was to go back in and edit menu.lst like you described. Pretty lame for a GUI and probably very frustrating for newcomers. I save a lot of headaches by making sure I make a boot floppy so no matter what I can always boot into something ;)

 

As for overwriting the the MBR...... I have Mandriva on hdb5. When the Mandriva install asked where to put the boot files, I selected "the first sector of hdb5". The next time I booted, I found that my previous boot menu (created from PCLinuxOS on hda1) had been replaced by the menu from Mandriva and PCLinuxOS was missing. Maybe I mis-understood, but I expected it to leave the original boot menu alone. This would allow me to boot to Windows and to PCLinuxOS but NOT mandriva until I modified menu.lst and re-wrote the MBR from PCLinuxOS, right?

 

Paul

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It should have left it alone, seems strange that it didn't - I have no explanation why.

 

The reason why Windows is always added regardless is because there is no real MBR for booting Windows anymore. This was common with Windows 9x, but with NT, etc, it doesn't require an MBR. When it boots it uses boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr to get Window NT/2000/XP/whatever running.

 

Now, when you install Linux and it detects a Windows partition that is bootable (ie: it finds boot.ini, ntdetect.com and ntldr) it adds that option to the lilo/grub menu. Because lilo/grub on the mbr is only a pointer to the boot files within Linux, it won't know about this unless it has access to the same configuration files - ie: with a shared /boot directory for grub. Lilo will be different, because the config is in /etc/lilo.conf normally and therefore would be different - never tried it. I mostly use grub nowadays. If you are using the same grub config file, menu.lst or grub.conf (one is usually a pointer to the other for compatibility) it will just append your new config to this file, and therefore mean you'll have both distros and Windows in the list to choose from. This is when you would need to ensure that if you do it this way, that you write the changes to /dev/hda or /dev/sda if using sata/scsi. Then you'll have all you should need to boot all distros and Windows.

 

GUI tools whilst nice, don't always work how you *think* they should. Sometimes they cause problems, usually if you use a combination of editing manually or gui tools.

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But but but.... wouldn't it be rather simple to write a routine that checked the "usual places" for boot files for other distros during Grub setup? It would seem to be an important point because unless the user has some system knowledge, installing a new distro will in effect kill any old ones unless you know how to edit the boot files. I know this is possible because I have seen Grub do it in PCLinuxOS. It detected ALL other distros as well as Windows just fine and set up menu.lst accordingly. The only problem was that it got the partition numbers wrong. Net effect was the same.... it killed Mandriva and Ubuntu. I learned a lot from that little episode ;)

 

Mandriva is up and running fine but I was having random total lockups in both Mandriva and PCLOS that I put down to my nVidia 6200. Never did it before I installed that card (recently). Since it is a PCI card (previous card was AGP) I figured it might be a resource conflict since I have the BIOS set to PnP Aware OS = NO. So I installed the nVidia driver and PCLOS settled down. Mandriva was..... fun. Turns out that the default Mandriva install doesn't install several packages required to compile and install the nVidia driver. I had a fun time cycling though shutting down X, typing in the shell script run command, finding out that there was ANOTHER missing package, logging out, starting X, starting the software manager and installing the missing package, shutting down X, etc. until I got them all. But when it finally compiled and installed, it seems to have stopped the freezing.

 

Wireless is still down, which is a pain because I only have four PCI slots and they are all occupied. There is no free slots for my PCI wired NIC. I have to pull my sound card and replace it with the NIC to get on the net and download updates and packages. But that I think is a subject for the hardware forum.....

 

Thanks for the help. So far, Mandriva is looking good. Too bad it doesn't support my Ralink wireless NIC so far.

 

Paul

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Mandriva is up and running fine but I was having random total lockups in both Mandriva and PCLOS that I put down to my nVidia 6200. Never did it before I installed that card (recently). Since it is a PCI card (previous card was AGP) I figured it might be a resource conflict since I have the BIOS set to PnP Aware OS = NO. So I installed the nVidia driver and PCLOS settled down. Mandriva was..... fun. Turns out that the default Mandriva install doesn't install several packages required to compile and install the nVidia driver. I had a fun time cycling though shutting down X, typing in the shell script run command, finding out that there was ANOTHER missing package, logging out, starting X, starting the software manager and installing the missing package, shutting down X, etc. until I got them all. But when it finally compiled and installed, it seems to have stopped the freezing.

 

Default is nv driver, you can install dkms-nvidia to get the nvidia drivers this way, or download direct from nvidia and then rerun the installation each time your kernel upgrades. However, dkms will do it automatically on rebooting with the new kernel. So, dkms much better way of doing it. Unless of course, you don't change your kernel often to a newer one.

 

Wireless is still down, which is a pain because I only have four PCI slots and they are all occupied. There is no free slots for my PCI wired NIC. I have to pull my sound card and replace it with the NIC to get on the net and download updates and packages. But that I think is a subject for the hardware forum.....

 

If all slots are full, not a lot we can do there :). But, yes, open a new post for your wireless problem. You have two options, a native driver if there is one available, or ndiswrapper. There's plenty of posts here about ralink wireless cards, do a search and check them out they might be able to help before you post.

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Default is nv driver, you can install dkms-nvidia to get the nvidia drivers this way, or download direct from nvidia and then rerun the installation each time your kernel upgrades. However, dkms will do it automatically on rebooting with the new kernel. So, dkms much better way of doing it. Unless of course, you don't change your kernel often to a newer one.

It was using the nv driver after installation. That was what it was using when it was freezing. After changing to the (direct download) nVidia driver, the freezing seems to have stopped.

 

Thanks for the tip about dkms-nvidia.... I'll look into that. Probably would have been easier than the way I did it ;)

 

Paul

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