Mandrake was a fatal mistake

[Ice-9]

I had my SuSe installed, everything was running fine except for hardware 3D support, apparently there are some conflicts between the NVidia driver and XFree86 .....
A friend of mine told me that his Mandrake 8.2 was running very well so I decided to give it a try, wiped my Linux partitions and installed Mandrake.
Install went well but after using it for a while I didn't like it as much as SuSe.
So what did I do?  I wiped my Linux partitions again and decided to install Suse again.
Man, man, man, what a mistake ......
I had nothing but trouble since.
First I received a "Cannot write to LILO boot" message, after that I couldn't even boot Windows anymore, did a fixboot and a fixmbr from the recovery console and Win boot was ok.
Installed Suse again, again the same LILO message, except after that I couldn't restore my mbr anymore so no Win2K!!!!
Re-installed Win2K and Suse, SuSe install going smooth, LILO installs but doesn't let me boot Windows anymore and 3D support is not configurable   .
Jeez, spent the last 24 hours to install, re-install, uninstall, configuring, cursing.
I'd like to go Linux-only but I feel I still lack some knowledge to do everything I did in Windows.
 
Maybe I should try Redhat?

[TheQuirk]

I posted this in a different thread, but this seems what exactly he needs..

open /etc/lilo.conf

I'm guessing you know where windows is..
anyway, add this:

other=/dev/hda1
table=/dev/hda
label=Windows

Replace "hda1" with where windows is, then change "hda" to the hard drive it's on.. If you don't know, just run cfdisk/fdisk and it will tell you. I'm pretty sure it's hda1, though.

[Ice-9]

Thanks, but already did that, I found reference tot that in SuSe's support database and it leaves me with an "Unexpected error in LILO"!!!!!!
I'm getting pretty desperate since it's at least my 10th install since yesterday.
Fucking Mandrake, overwrote SuSe's LILO but apparently overwriting Mandrake's own LILO is a no-go!
Restoring the mbr from Win2K rescue disc resulted in a loss of FATs.
Anyway, I'm giving up for now, I'm gettin a headache just by looking at my pc.
I'm gonna give Redhat a try later today but I'd really like to get SuSe going again.
I can't stand it when something refuses to work when it previously worked fine!!!!!!

And Randy Rhoads was so ahead of his time, completely off topic I know but I had to share this  

[TheQuirk]

run fdisk/cfdisk, erase *everything* and then reinstall. i know it doesn't make sence, but it sometimes works miracles, just like changing the number address thingies in SCSI devices :-p

[dbl221]

use the fdisk from Dos/windows and at the command prompt type:  fdisk /mbr

This overwrites the Master Boot Record.  The MBR is composed of 0-446 Bytes boot-strap code + 64 Bytes(4*16) for the 4 entry partition table plus 2 Bytes for the signature AA55.

fdisk from linux will not work...use the Dos version.

[TheQuirk]

yeah, that's for pointing that out. I never knew that, actually.

[Master of Reality]

I love Red Hat, dont like Mandrake (even though it is basically red hat). I like Slackware too, but havent used it with a GUI yet.

[Calum]

quote:Originally posted by dbl221:
use the fdisk from Dos/windows and at the command prompt type:  fdisk /mbr

that's what i was going to say, and i'd be muy interested to know if it solved the problem...
 

quote:
This overwrites the Master Boot Record.  The MBR is composed of 0-446 Bytes boot-strap code + 64 Bytes(4*16) for the 4 entry partition table plus 2 Bytes for the signature AA55.

Hey! if the MBR is written in machine code, i could write it myself couldn't i? without having to use lilo? (i know this would be pretty pointless, but i like to be able to do things more than one way) does anybody know how i would go about this?

[Ice-9]

Okay, did an fdisk /mbr with dos fdisk, it didn't solve the problem.
Every time I get the same message "Loading Windows. File missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart".

Next to that I fdisk-ed everything, it was 2.30 AM so I wnet to sleep after that but as soon as I come home from work today I'll give it another go.
I'll keep you posted.

[Calum]

i am having difficulty understanding the current state of your hard drive. Which systems are installed, and which bootloaders and boot records have what in them?

If you need a dual boot win2k and SuSE setup, do the fdisk /mbr to make sure, reinstall windows (or just test to see that your computer now boots to windows fine after the fdisk) then install SuSE last, placing your newly written boot record over the top of your windows boot record that you just made with fdisk. There are other multiboot solutions, i'm not sure how GRUB does all it's extra tricks...

so what setup do you have now, and what do you want to change?

Perhaps this thread will help. In particular:
 

quote:originally posted by DownSouthMoe:

As far as tri-booting goes, I do it with Windows using the boot.ini file. Screw LILO and GRUB, I don't use em'! Just partition your drives as you like them during the installs, and when it comes time to install a boot manager, simply don't do it or just install it to the drive that you are install UNIX/Linux on. Then, boot to UNIX/Linux using a boot disk and then mount a blank floppy and enter the command "dd /dev/hda5 bs=512 count=1 /mnt/floppy/bootsect.bsd" where hda5 is your drive that UNIX/Linux is installed on, and bootsect.bsd is whatever file name you want to call your booting file. Then, unmount your floppy and reboot into Windows, copy your file from the floppy to one of your directories (or folders) then edit boot.ini and add an entry like... C:\BOOTSECT.BSD "FreeBSD UNIX 4.5"
That will let you choose which OS you want to load whenever you're booting. It also gets around disk geometry problems associated with some of the Linux boot managers.
Currently I'm running Windows XP Professional, Mandrake Linux 8.2, and FreeBSD 4.5, and they all work just fine using this method.

[ June 17, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[ June 17, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[creedon]

If you purchased your hard drive new, you should have the floppy with the manufacturers software on it; use that to format & partition, it should get you back to a bare drive.  If you DON'T have the software floppy for your drive, go to the manufacturers website; they'll have the utility you need, but make REAL SURE you get the RIGHT utility; if you use the wrong one, you could perminantly damage your drive.
Once you use the right utility, you'll be able to re-install (you've got to be really sick of that by now) without any problems.

[Ice-9]

Okay, a quick update on things and a little explanation about my hard drives for Calum  
First drive is a 40GB IBM, 15GB Fat32 for Win2K and 25GB Fat32 for data.
Second drive is a WD 80GB, 40GB NTFS for Win data and 40GB for Linux to install on.
(This is the setup I used for my first 2 installs which went great).
So, this morning I fdisk-ed everything using dos-fdisk.
Now I just set up the same partitioning, finished instaling Win2K in the first partition and formatting the 40GB NTFS partition as I type.

Next thing I will do is install Linux again.
And you're soooooo right, I'm sick of installing at the moment, must have installed like 15 or 16 OSes by now  
So if Suse refuses to work again, I'll try and edit my lilo.conf again and if I can't get it to work I'll give Redhat a try.
Thanks all for the help, if everything works out I'll be back with Mozilla on Linux  

[Ice-9]

And here I am, back with Mozilla in Linux  
Installed without a glitch but had the ever annoying "NTLDR is missing", updated Lilo.conf as for some strange reason windows was listed as hdb1 where it should've been hda1 - this didn't happen the first times????
Rebooted and "BAM" there was that ugly Windows boot screen  
Again, thanks all for the help and tips.

[voidmain]

For large drives it is best if you create a small "/boot" partition (20-50MB) at the beginning of your drive.  You can put the main filesystem(s) at the end of the drive but put /boot up front which is where the boot loader and kernel will go at install time.  Some boot loaders have problems if the kernel is located at cylinder 1024 or higher.