HAHAHA this is funny

[Centurian]

Hey,

My wife reminded me that I needed a small windows partition on my system so we can play network games like diablo etc.

So I changed my partitioning and added a small Windows setup (2 gig and 4 gig). I have a W95 OEM copy I use to install base windows. I installed it without any problems or complaints. Then I went to upgrade it to W98 so I could use the 4 Gig Fat32 partition. When W98 got to setting up my hardware I got a message saying...

***************Message Begins***********
There are NO PNP DEVICES on your computer. Testing for NON-PNP DEVICES.
When you buy hardware make sure to buy ONLY PNP DEVICES with the MICORSOFT LABEL on them for compatibility and ease of installation.
***************Message Ends*************

I found this extremely funny and wrote it down word for word so I could pass it on to everyone.
It did take several minutes to find my non-pnp devices but once found they installed as easily as any pnp device in fact easier than most pnp devices.  

So now I have a small Windows partition for games and the rest is Mandrake 8.1.

Later
Centurian

[jtpenrod]

quote: So now I have a small Windows partition for games and the rest is Mandrake 8.1.

Same here. Also here is some friendly advice:
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE RUN DEFRAG - NEVER, EVER, ABSOLUTELY NOT, DON'T DO IT!!!

If you do, that sumbitch will nuke your MBR. You won't be able to boot into either Winders or Mandrake - not even with the emergency boot floppy. (You'll get a "kernel corrupted" error from Linux) Winders will insist you do a system restore from the CD. It'll give you choices ranging from the drastic: a complete reformat, to the mild: update system files in the windows directory. Makes no difference what you choose. On my rig, I chose the mild option. Next, it says it'll take 18 minutes to do this. To restore a few files? No - to nuke those "cancerous", "alien" OSs and the partitions they rode in on. Once this "recovery" was done, all the Winders files were still there, in pristine shape. I had to redo the Mandrake install from square one. Good thing I backed up all my valuable Linux data in Winders. (I don't completely trust His Gatesness) All it cost me was some time. (On the bright side, I'm learning an awful lot about doing Linux installs, and creating and extracting tar archives.)

How do these things happen? Winders says it doesn't recognize Linux partitions, and yet it manages to find the kernel and corrupt it. Defrag is suppose to leave the MBR alone, and yet it "somehow" renders Winders unable to boot. As they say, it's not a bug, it's a feature. I'm convinced there's some hidden code in there that does this deliberately.

I'll give Winders one more chance. But if it *ever* fucks with my Linux partitions again, it's coming off for good. And I will personally take that Winders recovery disk, fly to Redmond, and shove it right up Bill Gates' ass. (Just kidding    )

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by jtpenrod:


Same here. Also here is some friendly advice:
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE RUN DEFRAG - NEVER, EVER, ABSOLUTELY NOT, DON'T DO IT!!!

What?  I've never had a problem with this.  It sounds to me like you are running a UMSDOS installation of Linux, or you have your Linux kernel booted from your Win partition using something like loadlin.exe, in which case running a defrag would certainly cause this problem.  But if you have your entire Linux distribution including the kernel and boot code all on it's own ext2/ext3 partition defrag can't touch it. DOS/Win has no idea how to get outside of it's brain dead filesystem.

[Centurian]

Hey,

Hmmmmm that is strange. I have just redone everything recently so I have everything backed up at the moment. I think I will go try it and see if it causes that problem for me.

If I don't post again tonight then you can pretty much guess defrag crashed it. Hopefully I will post again though in a few minutes.  

Later
Centurian

[Centurian]

Hey,

Ok I tried running Defrag with no problems. It may have something to do with the combination of partitions on the hard drive. I am running Mandrake 8.1 using the ext2 filesystem and Windows 98SE using a Fat16 and a Fat 32 filesystem.
I figured this was a good time to take the risk since I just reinstalled everything. Not alot of extras to lose right.  

Hmmm While I am on the subject what is the difference between the Ext2 and Ext3 filesystems?

Later
Centurian

[jtpenrod]

quote: What? I've never had a problem with this. It sounds to me like you are running a UMSDOS installation of Linux, or
            you have your Linux kernel booted from your Win partition using something like loadlin.exe, in which case running a
            defrag would certainly cause this problem.

I have Mandrake on its own ext2 partition. According to Partition Magic, I have one primary partition that's just a bit over 3.0GB for Winders. The rest of the HD is an extended partition that includes the ext2 root and home partitions, and the swap partition. I'm using GRUB as the boot loader.
 

quote: But if you have your entire Linux distribution including the kernel and boot
            code all on it's own ext2/ext3 partition defrag can't touch it. DOS/Win has no idea how to get outside of it's brain
            dead filesystem.  

It is. And it seems as if DOS/Win just learned a new trick here. Defrag just fucked *everything* up. I certainly wasn't expecting that either. But it did happen.

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Centurian:

Hmmm While I am on the subject what is the difference between the Ext2 and Ext3 filesystems?

It's the Linux version of JFS. It basically adds filesystem journaling to ext2 (which is a good thing). I'm running ext3 on all my RedHat 7.2 machines and I love it so far.  If you trip over the power cable or the power goes out and your system goes down uncleanly you don't have to wait the minute or more of fsck time on the next system startup, it's nearly instant.

I used to use JFS on IBM RS6000s running AIX.  IBMs JFS was more robust as it also allowed you to resize your filesystems on the fly on a running system in addition to the reliability in the event of a power outage and the like.

In fact it looks like IBM has ported their JFS to Linux as well as SGI porting XFS to Linux which are also journaled filesystems.  According to http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1212 ext3 is the lowest performing of the 4 filesystems (I haven't noticed any difference between ext2 and ext3 personally but I sure like the difference in fsck time of ext3 over ext2).

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by jtpenrod:


It is. And it seems as if DOS/Win just learned a new trick here. Defrag just fucked *everything* up. I certainly wasn't expecting that either. But it did happen.

Hmm, what version of DOS/Win are you using?  I've been dual booting lotsa machines since about '93 and maybe I've just been lucky that this hasn't happened to me.  I assume you are using the Linux version of GRUB and the kernel along with GRUB reside on your linux partition in /boot, and /boot/grub?

Very interesting... Wonder if anyone else has had this problem. It truly is the first time I've heard of such a thing (shouldn't surprise me though, after all we are talking about Microshit).

[jtpenrod]

quote:Hmm, what version of DOS/Win are you using? ...I assume you are using the Linux version of GRUB and the kernel along with GRUB reside on your linux partition in /boot, and /boot/grub?

I have Win 95B, and I'm using the version of GRUB that came on the Mandrake CDs, and there is indeed a /boot/grub partition. I set this up during the install in "expert" mode. (I did the default Mandrake install on the old system that had Win 95 in the first place - with just a hair over rwo gigs on the HD, there wasn't enough room for both.) I did the expert install twice on this rig.

When Win 95 was first released, M$ was in the midst of the battle of the bootloaders with the OEMs and BeOS. (Guess who lost?      :eek:  ) That's why I wonder what's *really* going on here: is there something in Defrag that was secretly intended to nuke BeOS on the dual boot machines that the OEMs were offering at the time? Given the track record: the sabotaging of DR-DOS, Blue Mountain electronic greeting cards, the "service packs" that sabotaged Samba and Quick Time... really makes you wonder, doesn't it? Perhaps Win/DOS isn't quite so brain-dead after all?

[voidmain]

I would think it is more likely that it was a "problem" with Defrag that caused your system to crap due to bad programming (bad programming is rampant at Microsoft). I will consider myself lucky that it didn't happen to me, the worst defrag has ever done to me was screw up my Windows installation.  

One thing that is different on your scenerio, I can't say that I have ever run defrag with the GRUB loader installed. It has always been with LILO and have used various versions of DOS/Win95/98/NT/2k/OS2 multiboot configs and have never had a problem.  I did use GRUB for a while after installing RH72 on many of my machines but I don't believe I ran a defrag in Windows since that time (very rarely am I in Windows natively, usually if I need to use it, it's in a VMware session).

Now, couple of nights ago I ditched GRUB (although I like it) for the LILO that comes with the SuSe distribution, for the cool animated graphical boot screens (screens downloaded separately, see the message posted a couple of days ago regarding this subject).

And personally, Windows is on the endagered species list in my house, it's nearly extinct.

[jtpenrod]

quote: I would think that it was a "problem" with Defrag that caused your system to crap due to bad programming...

When I was setting up a partition to install QNX, Partition Magic indicated a problem with the VFAT partition. Somehow, the Mandrake partition setup caused an overlap between the VFAT and Linux partitions.    :eek:    I can't seem to be able to find it as Partition Magic shows these as seperate, and Hard Drake says that the VFAT partition spans cylinder 0 -- 402. It has the Linux extended partition running from cylinder 403 -- 848.    :confused:    That doesn't look like an overlap. If Partition Magic is right about this, then that would explain how Defrag managed to wipe out two OSs at one crack.

Furthermore, I don't see how the hell that happened. And not just once, the first time I lost all the Linux partitions. After installing a second time, it seems as if this overlap has happened again.  

[ February 08, 2002: Message edited by: jtpenrod ]

[voidmain]

Ahhh, you are running Mandrake.  Another difference between your setup and mine. You aren't running any sort of Ontrack Disk Manager garbage are you? Also, I know in the old days Linux wanted to be aligned on cylinder boundries and sometimes didn't like the way DOS partitions were laid out but I could always get around that using Linux' "fdisk" rather than the graphical Disk Druid at install time.  I haven't had any problems on the 7.x versions of RedHat on any machines.  I have *very* limited experience with the Mandrake Hard Drake. Is there anything in the Mandrake forums about this?

[jtpenrod]

Found a fix for this problem. You can start up Disk Drake, take a meg of so off the VFAT partition. Next, boot into Winders, then use Partition Magic to resize the VFAT partition back to where it was. That removes any partition overlap, and you don't lose any data or break anything.  

[lu666s]

I am actually glad that I do not have any dual boot issues. Some time ago (2 years back when I tried mandrake 6.0 and win98 on one machine), at some point similar thing happened to me, I don't really remember the circumstances, but a project that I was working on for days was trashed (win) and my email repository went down to tubes as well (lnx). I decided that to have a dual boot is generally a bad idea and when I'll be ready ... Took me a while, my boxen multiplied, so last summer I decided to dedicate one to linux. After a while, I realized that there is really any good reason why the other box has to be stuffed with a crappy os that crashes at least 6 times a day (w2k, way more stable than 98 that crashed about thrice as often). I have vmware on one of the boxen with w2k and surprisingly, when I use it the crash ratio is almost to zero. It is though, easy to reboot, it takes about 15 seconds to get to the login and I am already tapping nervously on the desk. Actually, lately it has been used quite infrequently, only to check some layouts in MSIE, which can be considered unfortunate but necessary due to its epidemic spread.

My third box is a server with no GUI, only commandline, but controlled remotely from LAN with a webmin like interface.

One day, the w2k running under vmware will be gone, perhaps in not too distant future. Good riddance, I'd say.

I am not sure what I am trying to say... maybe it is too late.

Maybe one thing... If one compares linux and winblows, linux has a tremendous depth, but somehow, it is not like an abyss, more like when one looks into starry blackness and feels one with the universe. Winblows seems to be skin deep, albeit one assumes a depth too, there must be. There is, a deep well, but it is full of horseshit.

I would not allow winblows to be an OS that is responsible for running my box, any of them.

[ February 09, 2002: Message edited by: lu666s ]