I typed "start." Nothing. Nothing! BEEP BEEP

[Va]

So, any Linux users out there?

[andalucia]

What an unfortunate time to post that.
Being an adventurous little geek with her first computer officially all to herself, I decided I'd partition the hard drive and run XP on one half, at my father's orders, and Mandrake on the other.  Last night when I tried to boot the computer with Mandrake, it didn't boot at all.  The thought of being stranded in a strange city without a working computer was a source of great great dread.  I was never so happy to see the Windows splash screen as this morning when the 'puter booted without question into XP.

[arkabee]

What an unfortunate time to post that.
Being an adventurous little geek with her first computer officially all to herself, I decided I'd partition the hard drive and run XP on one half, at my father's orders, and Mandrake on the other.  Last night when I tried to boot the computer with Mandrake, it didn't boot at all.  The thought of being stranded in a strange city without a working computer was a source of great great dread.  I was never so happy to see the Windows splash screen as this morning when the 'puter booted without question into XP.

did you "load mandrake and then load XP" or vice versa?

because if you loaded XP afterwards, it rewrote the bootsector, and grub/lilo is no longer managing which partition to load from, hence mandrake's partitions are still there you just aren't booting.

if that is the case, re-run the mandrake setup.

if not,
could be whole lotta things.

[Va]

What arkabee said.  In fact, if you loaded XP second, it might have eaten the entire drive and wiped out your Mandrake install.  But, it probably just ate the boot loader.

[Bozack]

Ehehehe. Once upon a time, when I was in 8th grade, I was pissed at my Windows box, so I installed Red Hat on it. It worked well, and I learned a fair amount about command line prompts; however, I got sick of never being able to, you know. DO anything aside from word processing and getting online.



So I got a Mac.

[Va]

I got sick of never being able to, you know. DO anything aside from word processing and getting online.

What, you don't like Unreal Tournament 2004?

So I got a Mac.

Spending money is a time-honored substitute for learning things.

[andalucia]

did you "load mandrake and then load XP" or vice versa?

Nope, XP was already installed.  So if Mandrake's hiding somewhere, how can I boot into it, so to speak?


I AM NOT SMART ENOUGH TO USE LINUX.

[arkabee]

Ehehehe. Once upon a time, when I was in 8th grade, I was pissed at my Windows box, so I installed Red Hat on it.

oh my goodness gravy i'm old.

I got sick of never being able to, you know. DO anything aside from word processing and getting online.

What, you don't like Unreal Tournament 2004?

see my above statement.  i'm assuming he used one of the earlier red hats, or i'm even older than i thought above.  so, his summation was pretty close.

So I got a Mac.

Spending money is a time-honored substitute for learning things.

heh.  good call, to some extent.

but to bring both full circle, and to flex my claws of geekedness a bit, i remember getting my order in of the latest distro and T-Shirt of MkLinux: Mach MicroKernel Linux on Mac, and after finishing the install, going back to Mac OS 7something because i was sick of not doing anything other than being in the state of just having had finished installing linux.

which, frankly, you could substitue that achewood comic at the top for a good picture of my thought process poking a stick at linux on a PowerComputing Boxen.

[AugustWest]

Ehehehe. Once upon a time, when I was in 8th grade, I was pissed at my Windows box, so I installed Red Hat on it.

oh my goodness gravy i'm old.

No shit, man!  When I was in 8th grade I was friggin' elated when a friend of mine's Dad got a TRS-80 with 16 glorious K.  Imhotep, baby!

[jough]

Man, when I was in 8th grade there was no windows, and DOS suck-k-k-k-k-k-ed.

In any case, I got a Commodore 128 soon after they came out, and it was the SHIT, and could run CP/M which had exactly ONE piece of software written for it (a Word Processor whose name escapes me) and it was all command liney and, well, DOS-y.

So it too sucked.

But man, I could program in basic and make the computer play music and ask me questions and stuff.  I made choose your own adventure types of games.  It was more fun than it sounds.

I wish I could get to my old C64/128 programmes.  I'd get a kick out of seeing that stuff again.

[Va]

My dad got me a C64 when I was in the 5th grade and I enjoyed that thing thoroughly until I upgraded my equipment by getting a used Nintendo my freshman year of college.  Oh, the hours, the years, I spent playing Bard's Tale 3...and only ever got to the 3rd dimension.

I shit you not, the first time I saw Windows (3.1) was when I got to my first assigment with the Air Force, in 1995.

[andalucia]

Oh boy.

Sorry to be resurrecting this thread for my own personal gain, but I'm kind of terrified about my computer situation right now.  I had XP running on a partition that was half the size of my hard drive, and last night I was bored out of my mind, so I split the blank half into two partitions: the idea being that I'd run XP on one of the small partitions and Mandrake on the other, then once that was going smoothly, just use the large partition for sharing music & document files between the two OS partitions.  
So I'm writing this morning from Mandrake, but I haven't been able to boot back into Windows: that is to say when I get to the boot menu, there's nothing that seems to look like the option for "go back to that evil yet comforting operating system".  I'm 80+% sure that I installed Mandrake into the correct partition, but I'm getting a little scared for the vast amounts of data I had in my Windows partition.

Any advice would be vastly appreciated.  This board has proved itself time and again as a good source of counsel of all sorts for many of us and I know there are a lot of geeks out there.

So, how do I tell if I've fucked up irreperably or not?

[Va]

If you installed Mandrake, I'm guessing your bootloader is LILO.  The choices you get when you boot up are determined by the configuration file for LILO, which should be named lilo.conf.  I can't recall exactly where that file lives. It's probably in /etc. If it's not in /etc, run this command to find it:

Code:

find / -name lilo.conf -print

Now, if you have just one hard drive in your machine, it is probably designated hda, and different partitions of it will be hda1, hda2, etc.  From your description below, it sounds like you have three partitions, one with XP installed, one with Mandrake, and one idle, so I guess you have an hda1, hda2 and hda3.  If you don't know what partition your XP is on, here's one way to find out that I can think of off the top of my head.  Use cfdisk to see the partitions on the disk:

Code:

cfdisk /dev/hda

You will have to be root.  The partitions and what sort of filesytem is on them will be shown in a table.  It should be obvious which is the windows partition.  Take note of the partition name and quit cfdisk.  For illustration purposes, let's pretend it is hda1.

Now, open your lilo.conf file with a text editor like vim or gedit.  Go to the bottom of the file and add two lines like this:

Code:

other=/dev/hda1
label=winXP

Remember, we picked hda1 for illustrative purposes, if the XP partition is different, change the line accordingly.  Also, the label can be pretty much whatever you want--it probably should not contain spaces, and there's almost certainly a limit on how many characters, but you know what I mean.  Okay, save lilo.conf and exit your text editor.  Now you run the lilo command:

Code:

lilo

And you'll see some output.  If all of the above worked, you should be able to reboot and lilo will present you with the option to boot into "winXP" or whatever string you choose for your label.

Jough, anyone, can I get a peer-review of these instructions?

[AugustWest]

Lilo and Stitch was a good movie.

[arkabee]

there is a good chance that it is grub rather than lilo, simply because i hate grub and would have no idea what advice to offer, and because i've always felt that mandrake would want you to have the latest and greatest regardless of whether it worked or not.

that being said, most recent distros i've seen installed on a disk/disks that already had a windows partition active, put an icon on the user's desktop for "windows c:" or somesuch, a shortcut to an automount of the partition.

given that it's XP, and there's a problem, i'd give it a 99.99999% chance of it being an ntfs partition, because if it was fat of some sort, it would be easy, and if it were easy it wouldn't be so much fun we wanted to learn new curse words to swear at it with.

if it's ntfs, we likely have many more problems.

i guess at this point, i'd be _very_ curious what got *clicky-clicky*'ed during the install process when it came up and said "hey, there's a hard drive here, do you want me to use all of it or do you want me to try and not destroy everything?"  because, the answer to that could save us all a lot of trouble.

that being said, i'd stick my trust win98 startup floppy in the drive, boot off that, run "fdisk", view the partition table, and try and see what the partition struction looked like all the while NOT MAKING ANY CHANGES AND BEING INCREDIBLY CAREFUL NOT TO MAKE ANY CHANGES.

then i would probably post that to the intrarwebnet.