The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Science & Nature => Topic started by: Va on August 23, 2004, 11:20:54 pm
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So, any Linux (http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=12052001) users out there?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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:
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:
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:
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:
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?
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Lilo and Stitch was a good movie.
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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.
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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.
My XP partition is NTFS but the two smaller ones I created are FAT32. Va, I'm going to tryyour advice right now, and your confident tone reassures me somewhat. I was thinking about my poor computer through lectures all morning.
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My XP partition is NTFS but the two smaller ones I created are FAT32. Va, I'm going to tryyour advice right now, and your confident tone reassures me somewhat. I was thinking about my poor computer through lectures all morning.
so, you had a HD partitioned 1/2 NTFS and 1/2 blank.
then you created 2 fat partitions.
so, it would be 1/2 NTFs, 1/4 FAT, 1/4 FAT.
the NTFS had your XP install etc et al.
you stcuk in the mandrake cd and installed where?
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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:
find / -name lilo.conf -print
Ok.
Say one ran that command and one's computer went BLORP. and the run command window disappeared. (Alarmingly close to the thread's title, yes, I'm aware)
How would one interpret that?
Edit: arkabee, I installed Mandrake to one of the two FAT partitions.
Edit encore:
HardDrake shows, under Disk, hda, sda, and sdb. Presumably these are my three partitions. Is this a good sign?
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Your first problem is that you're running Mandrake. But I'll digress from Linux distro snobbery.
sda? That's a removeable device, not a hard disk partition. Hm... :shock:
What Va wrote should have worked fine - PROVIDED that your partitions are set up right and the bios can see your entire HD, etc.
What did you install first? Windows? And how did you create the partitions?
You may have to mount the partitions, but let me think about this for a minute before telling you something that could damage what you already have.
Unless you or something on your PC already deleted a partition, you should be able to recover your data, especially if you can boot to Linux.
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Your first problem is that you're running Mandrake. But I'll digress from Linux distro snobbery.
sda? That's a removeable device, not a hard disk partition. Hm... :shock:
What Va wrote should have worked fine - PROVIDED that your partitions are set up right and the bios can see your entire HD, etc.
What did you install first? Windows? And how did you create the partitions?
You may have to mount the partitions, but let me think about this for a minute before telling you something that could damage what you already have.
Unless you or something on your PC already deleted a partition, you should be able to recover your data, especially if you can boot to Linux.
I know Mandrake doesn't have the distro cred. I'm trying it because it's supposedly easy. I was worried that the sda's weren't partitions. I had my computer built for me and requested that Windows run in its own partition, leaving the rest of the hard drive for me to fuck around with. So Windows was installed first, and the subsequent partitions were created in the XP Disk Management utility.
Oh, and arkabee, I can't get my computer to boot from a Windows disk. It just goes straight to Mandrake's boot menu.
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1- go into BIOS and tell it to boot from A/FLOPPY first, before it boots from the HD. depending on your BIOS, it may be in various places. yer a smart kid, i'm sure it will be fun.
2- you can't install linux onto a FAT partition.
3- i would interpret "BLORP" as : get the hell out of the GUI. hold <CTRL> and <ALT> down, and press <F1>. log on as root, and run VA's command again, and tell us what it said.
3- sd# is usually designated for scsi, it could be the cd-rom if it's atapi. regardless.
4- at the root prompt, do the following-
- "fdisk /dev/hda"
it should say "press m for help"
do so, it your specific alternate.
"p" should be "print partition table"
do so, or your specific alternate.
"q" should be "quit without saving changes"
do so, pr your specific alternate.
post the result.
5- which version of Mandrake did you install?
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6- and which bootloader did you tell it to use when you installed:
lilo or grub?????
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2- you can't install linux onto a FAT partition.
I will try your other instructions, but this is the part that frightens me most, and makes me wish I hadn't installed Mandrake so late at night. Because essentially that means either the installer reformatted the partition or it installed Mandrake over XP on my NTFS partition, in which case I'm fucked. Unfortunately, it's kinda seeming that way. I do have my important files backed up on my PC back home in Ontario, but still, not having access to any of my music or documents until Thanksgiving would rather suck, and also mean that my mixswap CDs would be very very late indeed.
Oh, and I installed Mandrake 9.1.
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Although running the search outside of the gui at least worked, I got file/directory not found when I did the search for lilo.
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2- you can't install linux onto a FAT partition.
I will try your other instructions, but this is the part that frightens me most, and makes me wish I hadn't installed Mandrake so late at night. Because essentially that means either the installer reformatted the partition or it installed Mandrake over XP on my NTFS partition, in which case I'm fucked. Unfortunately, it's kinda seeming that way. I do have my important files backed up on my PC back home in Ontario, but still, not having access to any of my music or documents until Thanksgiving would rather suck, and also mean that my mixswap CDs would be very very late indeed.
Oh, and I installed Mandrake 9.1.
no sleep sucks.
since you had an existing partition structure when you installed, and since 9.1 is pretty recent, it would have given you a choice:
do i use the whole disk, or just part of it boss?
no sleep sucks.
there's a geat chance that the NTFS partition still exists, and the mandrake install whomped on one of the other patitions.
- Run: "df -vk" from a command prompt and post the result. this, incidnetally, can not mess anything up. also, run "mount" and post the result.
so, if mandrake installed on one of the other partitions, it would have reformateed it to a diff partion type, hence "linux can't install on fat". head cold is messing with my ability to be coherent.
ok, so let's say the ntfs is ok. you boot, your BIOS is apparently set to boot of HD first, so it looks at the MasterBootRecord of the first HD it sees, and you linus boot loader takes over.
which boot loader is it? is it lilo or is it grub? the world may never know.
so the bootloader, residing in the MBR (or at least enough of it ...) does it's thing, which is apparently (since you can configure it to do different things, which is why we need to know "grub or lilo" or else we won't be able to tell you how to boot to windows later if we figrue out if you still have an ntfs partition) to zoom over to the linux partition and find your /boot partition and then linux starts a loading.
so, we need to figure out:
1) do you have an ntfs partition anymore
2) how to get it to boot from that partition if it' s there anymore.
hence all the questions.
incidentally, i hope i'm not sounding like a dick, i'm just sort of dizzy right now.
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Although running the search outside of the gui at least worked, I got file/directory not found when I did the search for lilo.
you prolly have grub.
anyways,
did you see a screen like this:
http://doc.mandrakelinux.com/MandrakeLinux/91/en/Quick_Startup.html/drakxid-doPartitionDisks.html
when you were isntalling?
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Although running the search outside of the gui at least worked, I got file/directory not found when I did the search for lilo.
you prolly have grub.
anyways,
did you see a screen like this:
http://doc.mandrakelinux.com/MandrakeLinux/91/en/Quick_Startup.html/drakxid-doPartitionDisks.html
when you were isntalling?
I'll do a search for grub and try that out. But yeah, I did see that screen and I did tell it to install to the existing 1/4 partition. If I recally correctly (unlikely) it said that that it'd need to create mount points on that partition, which I let it do, thinking that everything would henceforth be hunky-dory.
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I'll do a search for grub and try that out. But yeah, I did see that screen and I did tell it to install to the existing 1/4 partition. If I recally correctly (unlikely) it said that that it'd need to create mount points on that partition, which I let it do, thinking that everything would henceforth be hunky-dory.
this indeed would be the good and happy data that makes the truth of your hard drive smile.
go forth and run "mount" and "df -vk" and post the results, and we shall have your grub eating out of your hand in no time.
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verily did ye see a screen thusly!:
http://doc.mandrakelinux.com/MandrakeLinux/91/en/Quick_Startup.html/misc-params.html#drakxid-setupBootloader
(you might have to scroll down to see the section, it was messed up for me. it's called "Bootloader".)
???
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Arkabee, you are a million kinds of awesome for helping me out with this. Especially In Your Weakened State:
It didn't recognize df-vk as a command.
When I gave the command "mount", it said this:
/dev /ide /host0 /bus0 /target0 /lun0/ part1 on /type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
none on /proc /bus /usb type usbdevfs (rw)
none on /dev type devfs (rw)
none on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev type devpts (rw, mode=06020)
none on /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part b on /home type ext3 (rw)
none on /mnt/floppy typesupermount (rw, sync, dev=/dev/fd0, fs=ext2:vfat,--, umask=0, iocharset=iso8859 -15, codepage=850
So the consensus seems to be that There Is None.
This is all extremely humbling after years of using Windows.
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verily did ye see a screen thusly!:
http://doc.mandrakelinux.com/MandrakeLinux/91/en/Quick_Startup.html/misc-params.html#drakxid-setupBootloader
(you might have to scroll down to see the section, it was messed up for me. it's called "Bootloader".)
???
I did not see such a screen, as far as I recall.
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phonetically:
Dee Eff Space Dash Vee Kay.
"df -vk" there's a space, in between.
try the thing about fdisk too.
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phonetically:
Dee Eff Space Dash Vee Kay.
"df -vk" there's a space, in between.
try the thing about fdisk too.
Thanks... (I suck.)
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use % Mounted on
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 6040288 997824 4735628 18%
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6 70382392 105636 702767 1% /home
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i hate red hat. i hate linux. did i ever tell you the time it took me 3 weeks to geta printer to work ebcause Digi never ported their config utility from SCO to linux??
um, do what i said way up there about "fdisk".
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i hate red hat. i hate linux. did i ever tell you the time it took me 3 weeks to geta printer to work ebcause Digi never ported their config utility from SCO to linux??
um, do what i said way up there about "fdisk".
File or directory not found.
Ready to give up?
I sure am.
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i hate red hat. i hate linux. did i ever tell you the time it took me 3 weeks to geta printer to work ebcause Digi never ported their config utility from SCO to linux??
um, do what i said way up there about "fdisk".
File or directory not found.
Ready to give up?
I sure am.
type "which fdisk".
type "which cfdisk".
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which fdisk
/sbin/fdisk
which cfdisk
usr/sbin/cfdisk
I swear I'll never complain about Windows again.
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Are you root? You have to be root to run cfdisk.
Please don't hate Linux. It just takes time to learn. Feel free to hate Red Hat. And Mandrake.
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Are you root? You have to be root to run cfdisk.
Please don't hate Linux. It just takes time to learn. Feel free to hate Red Hat. And Mandrake.
Yep, I am. I couldn't have entered any of those commands if I weren't.
Out of curiosity, what distro would you have recommended?
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I'm thinking Va is a slackware kinda girl.
I really liked SUSE, but it is gone now.
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SUSE is gone?
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I'm thinking Va is a slackware kinda girl.
I totally take that as a complement, but my distro is gentoo.
What distro I would recommend? Gentoo is nice, but you need to be very comfortable with the command line to do a gentoo install, and it takes quite a while, because everything is compiled from source for your hardware, though there are ways to take shortcuts. After the initial install, maintenance is a breeze, and software installation is beyond easy, but it tends to take a while because, again, everything is compiled from source.
Debian is also very nice, very easy to keep updated, but last time I checked, initial installation was a bit challenging. I think I remember seeing where someone had created an installation procedure for Debian based on the Knoppix LiveCD, and made the install much easier.
As for the graphical-type distros like Red Hat, Mandrake, SUSE, whatever, well, I hate them all. But I used Mandrake before I moved to gentoo. My position is, if you're going to use Linux, you owe it to yourself to learn Linux, or you might as well be using Windows. Maybe it's snobbery, but I think if you can't learn to love and appreciate the command line for those things it does best, you're probably never going to like Linux. You can have lots of fun with Linux, and learn a bunch with no commitment by using the Knoppix LiveCD distro--it's a full-featured Linux distro on a CD that runs completely out of memory and changes nothing on your hard drive. (BTW: A Knoppix CD is good to have around as a rescue disk, even if you only run Windows. No matter how fucked up your Windows install is, you can always pop in a Knoppix CD and get access to your files.)
I have some command line tutorials I wrote for my local LUG a million years ago, I can make those available if anyone is interested.
I really liked SUSE, but it is gone now.
SUSE is gone? I just bought a set of SUSE disks from LinuxCDs.com, I thought it might be nice for a friend of mine who is not extremely comfortable with the command line. I've grown to hate all that graphical Windows-wannabee crap. It's like, you have these graphical tools, but if they don't work, what do you do then? All they're doing is altering configuration files in the background, except they hide from you what they're doing, so if they fuck up, you don't know to do about it. You might as well be running Windows. Just wait, some fuck*ng GENIUS is going to recreate the Windows registry under Linux. Probably those Lindows fucks. Just wait.
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Suse got bought by novell. apparently jough thinks that suse's soul is gone now or something?
persoanlly, i take it either:
Novell is making a last ditch effort to matter again
or
it shows that Linux as a revenue generating product is a sustainable business model, and Novell had very good experience in selling and maintaining a printing & file sharing operating system, which lends some weight to the whole "yay linux" thing.
i think that what a lot of "linux fans" fail to see is that the people who are going to PAY CASH MONEY for things want to pay cash money for something that is going to work, and is going to be supported.
Patrick Volkerding is a nice guy, hell he's in the same cult i'm in and i met him at the end of the world in '98, but Slackware is not going to be running on GLORP CORP's servers, because GLORP CORP isn't going to be able to get a contract that says "we pay you money and you don't disappear" from them, regardless of the fact that such a contract really isn't going to stop anyone from disappearing.
i love how slashdotters (i lurk every couple of months, then get tired ot it) think that SCO is the debbil, yet have no idea why SCO is even in business, or what about SCO's Openserver (SCO's biggest cash cow) Line was so marketable.
So, i hope Novell "legitamizes" "linux" with the Suse product line, i really really do.
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andalucia:
from a command prompt type "dmesg > /tmp/dmesg.txt" and then optn the /tmp/dmesg.txt and copy it and paste it and post it.
also, unix/linux command line commands, etc, ARE INCREDIBLY case sensitive. spaces are important, etc. just an fyi.
anyone else:
i don't know if "/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1" is a mandrake or a red hat -ism or what, i certainly hope it's not something the newer kernels are all about, etc, because it's dumb. why use scsi terminology for ide? i mean, primary or secondary, master or slave.
or, waitaminute...
andalucia: you said some built this PC for you?? did they use SATA (serial ATA) Hd's or regular old IDE hd's?????????
Va- i don't know "cfdisk" so if you think it might get our partition table easier than "Fdisk" then run with it. fdisk, i know you have to toss it the path to the driveyou want to lok at (fdisk /dev/hda , fdisk /dev/sdb, etc). if cfdisk doesn't need that, then let's try that, because i'm still trying to figure out that "/dev /ide /host0 /bus0 /target0 /lun0/ part1" path.
i'd _guess_ i'd want to run "fdisk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/SOMETHING" i'm just not sure what the somehting would be yet. if it were simply /dev/hda4 i'd say run "fdisk /dev/hda" but i don't know about "part1", it would seem like that would mean partition 1 of "/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/" but there could be a "partition0" etc, and the drive in it's entirety might be "partition" or it could be "drive".
hmmm.
Andalucia: type "ls -la /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0 > /tmp/lun0ls.txt" and post the contents of that file.
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Well, Novell bought SUSE and promptly killed it.
It's believed that they are developing a new distro based on SUSE that will focus on the desktop. If anyone can make Granny-Linux work (i.e. Linux that my 85 year old grandmother can use with no prior PC experience) it's Novell.
I mean, they didn't invent networking, but they made it viable for both large and small offices.
I have faith.
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http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/ec_Main.Entry?SP=10007&SID=40017&CID=0&CUR=840&DSP=0&PGRP=0&CACHE_ID=0
i figure whatever novell ends up doing, it's probably going to suck horribly. i hope it doesn't, but it probably will.
i think there's a good chance, though, that corporate will eat it up like hotcakes, and i think that would be a good thing though.
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i figure whatever novell ends up doing, it's probably going to suck horribly. i hope it doesn't, but it probably will.
What, you mean like NetWare, the gold-fuck*ng-standard for high-end networking for more than a decade, and well, STILL, in many applications.
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Things going yet worse.
When I try to enter any commands, it doesn't acknowledge them, it just brings up a new command line, sort of like how the Run Command option in the GUI seems not to do anything at all, just sort of fires commands off into the aether and makes my computer make a noise. I can't even begin to understand why this might be happening.
I've tried to take sceen shots to show you what I've done, but apparently I can't, since programs other than this shitty browser rarely open. Needless to say, I'm pretty frustrated.
Oh, also, arkabee, they're just IDE HDs.
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Things going yet worse.
When I try to enter any commands, it doesn't acknowledge them, it just brings up a new command line, sort of like how the Run Command option in the GUI seems not to do anything at all, just sort of fires commands off into the aether and makes my computer make a noise. I can't even begin to understand why this might be happening.
I've tried to take sceen shots to show you what I've done, but apparently I can't, since programs other than this shitty browser rarely open. Needless to say, I'm pretty frustrated.
Oh, also, arkabee, they're just IDE HDs.
are you running a terminal window inside the GUI, or did you do <ctrl>+<alt>+<F1> to bring up a text psuedo term?
what type of noise? a beeping, or a grinding or what?
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Va- i don't know "cfdisk" so if you think it might get our partition table easier than "Fdisk" then run with it. fdisk, i know you have to toss it the path to the driveyou want to lok at (fdisk /dev/hda , fdisk /dev/sdb, etc). if cfdisk doesn't need that, then let's try that, because i'm still trying to figure out that "/dev /ide /host0 /bus0 /target0 /lun0/ part1" path.
cfdisk is just a version of fdisk with (I think) prettier output.
cfdisk /dev/hda
should work.
That /dev/ide/host/blah/blah/blah is really the full path of the device file. /dev/hda1 and so on are actually symlinks. Go to /dev and do an ls -l. That shit is all symlinks.
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i figure whatever novell ends up doing, it's probably going to suck horribly. i hope it doesn't, but it probably will.
What, you mean like NetWare, the gold-fuck*ng-standard for high-end networking for more than a decade, and well, STILL, in many applications.
exactly.
how long did it take novel to incorporate TCP/IP into netware, and did you ever try and use it once it did?
incidentally, you seem to have taken offense at the word "suck" used to describe a novell product? i use it solely as a reference to the 1st law of computing:
All Hardware Sucks.
All software Sucks.
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are you running a terminal window inside the GUI, or did you do <ctrl>+<alt>+<F1> to bring up a text psuedo term??
I've been using ctl alt f1/f7 to switch in and out of the gui.
what type of noise? a beeping, or a grinding or what?
Grinding-type noise. The aforementioned BLORP.
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cfdisk is just a version of fdisk with (I think) prettier output.
cfdisk /dev/hda
should work.
That /dev/ide/host/blah/blah/blah is really the full path of the device file. /dev/hda1 and so on are actually symlinks. Go to /dev and do an ls -l. That shit is all symlinks.
- cfdisk _is_ pretty. AND it doesn't need any flags passed to it.
- # ls -l hda
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 0 Mar 23 2002 hda
# ls -l cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Dec 31 1987 cdrom -> /dev/hda
so, no, /dev/hd* are not necessarily symlinks.
i don't have /dev/ide on my SCSI server, nor do i see it on my friend's ide-based box. both are SUSE linux, 2.4* kernels.
and i don't know anything about gentoo, but what kernel are you on?
ANDALUCIA!!! run "cfdisk" and copy and paste the screen that shows the partitions.
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and i don't know anything about gentoo, but what kernel are you on?
ANDALUCIA!!! run "cfdisk" and copy and paste the screen that shows the partitions.
2.6.5
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and i don't know anything about gentoo, but what kernel are you on?
2.6.5
ugh. i wish it was "learn something new everyday" instead of "learn something new everyday because we just changed the entire underlying structure of the universe while you were asleep." sigh.
incidentally, "fdisk -l" will list the partition table of, apparently, the disks that are being used.
also, it seems /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc would be hda, while
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 would be hda1, etc.
now, what would hdb be? why did they change this? why use scsi terminology to describe ide devices???
if i have 4 HD's, Primary Master & Slave, Secondary Master and Slave,
Primary master would be
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
would Pri Slave be
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/disc
? it's on the same controller as Pri Master, so "host" _should_ be the same. it's on the same bus, and i have no idea how you apply "lun"s to IDE.
so, then, Secondary Master should be
/dev/ide/host1/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
and Secondary Slave
/dev/ide/host1/bus0/target1/lun0/disc ????
did they do that to allow support for SATA drives? or are so many people adding PCI IDE controllers that the needed more ease of use for more than 4 IDE devices????
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And more to the point, why use "sda" and "sdb" etc. for USB removeable drives?
I plug in my bullet drive (is that a gig of memory in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?) into the usb and it shows up as "sda." WTF?
Anyway, Linux is way more powerful and more configurable than any other common OS, but it sure ain't as easy as Windoze. YET.
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Anyway, Linux is way more powerful and more configurable than any other common OS, but it sure ain't as easy as Windoze. YET.
Windoze makes things "easy" by making sure you can't really do much of anything. It's easy to make things "easy" that way.
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Is it "be simplistic" day in Alabama or something?
I'm no cheerleader of Microsoft, but MS opponents seem to overstate the problems with Windows.
The truth is that you CAN do a lot with it, AND it's easy to use (relatively).
I mean, what do you think I can't do on my windows box? I do more work before 4AM than most people do all day, and I do it on a Windows XP box most of the time.
Yes, I do most of my web development on a LAMP box, but I still can't find an e-mail client I like as much as Eudora, or a photo editor that's as powerful as Photoshop. GIMP? Puh-leaze.
Plus, I like to listen to DVD commentaries while I do tedious coding and such, and any kind of CPU-intensive I/O in Linux is a bitch to get working right, and usually requires SOURCE CODE changes - it's nice that I *can* change things if I need to, but my 78 year old grandmother can MAKE CDs and edit photographs in Windows XP - Linux would give her a stroke - KDE's Windows-like GUI notwithstanding (I mean, it even has a Start Menu, and of course the "Redmond" theme is a direct homage to MS).
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You're right, I'm an idiot.
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here's the thing i love the most about "linux" and hate about "linux":
~~~~ (note, this indicates a "Dream sequence", because the following transcript is made up. however, i bet it's close to reality)
linuxdude1- hey man, usb is so cool. when are we going to have drivers?
linuxdude2- stfuomg!!! do it yerself lamer!
linuxdude1- ok jerk, i will!!!
linuxdude3- no way dude, i will create the drivers be4 u do!!!
-- time passes
linuxdude1- hey man, look! i have usb drivers!!
linuxdude3- u suck ur mom.
linuxdude2- wtf!? why would i attach usb to /dev/hde??!?! are you on crack? you're a script kiddie.
/linuxdude1 cries.
-- time passes
linuxdude3- look, i have usb drivers!!
/linuxdude1 still crying
linuxdude2- cool! what's /dev/sd# for?? i've never used it on my mom's old compaq armada laptop!?
linuxdude3- um, it stands for Super Drive because usb is so cool!!
linuxdude2- neat!! let's get these to the kernel release team ASAP so everyone can start using them before someone who has any historical perspective looks at them and realizes we don't really know what we are doing in reference to the big picture!!
linuxdude3- i am the greatest hacker evar!!!
--- time passes
linuxdude4- you put usb in my scsi!!!
linuxdude5- your scsi got in my usb!!!
Mr. Torvalds- oy vey!
--
in other words jough, i have no idea why i would WANT to have my usb drive linked to a dev structure historically associated with SCSI devices.
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Arkabee, You..Are..Rad.
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I ran cfdisk and and it said that I had three partitions still, two of which had Things in them!
Yaaay!
Arkabee=Jesus.
Now all I need to know is how to get there.
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I ran cfdisk and and it said that I had three partitions still, two of which had Things in them!
Now all I need to know is how to get there.
i need you to copy the text that cfdisk puts on the screen, and post it here so that we can see it.
also,
please note that VA said to do the cfdisk thing a loooong time ago, and i had never heard of it until she mentioned it.
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please note that VA said to do the cfdisk thing a loooong time ago, and i had never heard of it until she mentioned it.
Oh.
Will do.
And sorry, Va, for the unintentional slight. I very very very much appreciate all the help I have gotten.
Disk Drive: /dev/hda
Size: 80026361856 bytes, 80.0 GB
Heads: 255 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 9729
Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hd1 Primary Linux ext3 6284.12
hd5 Logical Linux swap 518.20
hd6 Logical Linux ext3 73221.45
I hope this means... good things??
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Disk Drive: /dev/hda
Size: 80026361856 bytes, 80.0 GB
Heads: 255 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 9729
Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hd1 Primary Linux ext3 6284.12
hd5 Logical Linux swap 518.20
hd6 Logical Linux ext3 73221.45
I hope this means... good things??
um. see where it says "linux" next to each partition that it sees? that would be a "bad sign".
it's an 80GB drive? it says it's an 80 gb drive. it says it has 73.2GB on hd6, it says it has a 500+ MB swap partition, and it says it has a 6.2GB on hd1.
the math would say 80GB is being used...
when you ran mount, it said you had a root (/) partition and a /home partion.
mount would NOT say anything about the swap partition.
andalucia, it would appear that when you installed Mandrake, it was told to use the entire disk to use, and it did, and it repartitioned the entire disk.
if you have larger than an 80GB hard drive, like, a 120GB HD, then maybe, maybe, there's hope.
otherwise, it would appear that you lost your ntfs partition.
sorry.
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I hope this means... good things??
Unless there is another drive in your computer, I have to say, no, that does not look promising. I see only Linux partiitons there. That is an 80GB drive and I see 80GB of Linux partitions. I think you may have inadvertantly allowed Mandrake suck up the whole disk when you did the install.
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Dammit.
Well, good to know.
Thanks to both of you very much.
So.
How do I wipe my hard drive from here so I can reinstall Windows?
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If you're re-installing Win2K or XP, just insert the CD and reboot. Windows will handle the partitioning (I mean, you'll have to delete the partitions you don't want and re-format the one(s) you do - I recommend deleting all partitions and then re-partitioning again).
Then all Windows to re-format the partition and you're good to go.