I made the switch from Red hat to mandrake, partly b/c i was tired of second-guessing everything to get red hat to do what i wanted it to. I heard mandrake was easy to use, so i downloadedthe ISos, burned them, and installed. Setup went fine and I installed KDE, GNOME, IceWM, and others.

However, I was damn careful in the bootloader section. I opted to boot off of a disk, so I fed it a disk and it made a bootloader on the floppy. I rebooted.

I first made sure that i could still get into windows xp (I can), so i popped in the disk and tried to boot mandrake, however no bootloader showed up. I thin kthe disk turned bad right after mandrake setup wrote to it or something (all of my floppy disks are f***ing ancient, well over 4 years old. They've only lasted this long b/c they have plastic sliders instead of metal, which seems to demagnetize the disks)

Anyway, I have mandrake installed, but no way to boot into it. Is there a way that I can make a boot disk now so I can get into the OS?




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I have found that you can transform your character solely by the power of belief: as you believe yourself to be, so you shall become over time.

Try and get grub, get the image for a emergency boot disk and install it. Documentation is lying around


Hopefully this link will help you:
http://www.uruk.org/orig-grub/install.html

This is kinda tricky, I've done this before tons of times, you need to after you install GRUB to the MBR point it to a file called grub.conf on either a FAT or EXT2 partition (probibly your linux partition). The Contents of the file should look something like this:


You'll need to point GRUB in the right directon for the linux kernel also, usually it's in /boot . You might need something like Knoppix or some kind of linux partition reader to get the right names for the files.

The hard disk numeration system works like this (hd#,%) where # is the physical disk and % is the partition number. Primary partitions are numbered 1-4 while extended are 5-OO. It'll probibly take you a lil while the first time, but after you get it the first time it'll be a piece of cake! Good luck!

[This message has been edited by SwedishBorgie (edited August 02, 2004).]

BEFORE you do that:

Download TestDisk.

I edited the grub config file, stuffed my MBR so badly I couldnt fix it up using 2000 CD.
My brother fixed it using testdisk. Download it and Active@'s thing as well...burn it on CD, and tehn test it.

THEN and only then, try and edit grub.

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Founder of the Massassi Brute Squad (MBS)

B'tduz: A popular dwarfish game which consists of standing a few feet apart and throwing large rocks at one another's head.

"Yes, it's a bloody flying alligator setting fire to my city!" - His Grace His Excellency the Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes.

Morituri Nolumus Mori

Fixed. Thanks!

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I have found that you can transform your character solely by the power of belief: as you believe yourself to be, so you shall become over time.

I think you should use a real distribution, like Debian/Knoppix, Slackware or Gentoo.

I started with Mandrake. After using (in order) Slackware, Debian and Gentoo, I'd never go back.

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"The future is not determined by a throw of the dice, but is determined by the conscious decisions of you and me."
I am addicted to ellipses!!! AHHH!!! ...
Make Sorrowind Worthwhile... join it! http://sorrowind.net

This is one of those rare and beautiful moments when I actually agree with something Jon says. Listen to him, he speaks the truth.

While, IMO, Mandrake is better than RH as a desktop system, its still RPM based. You still have to deal with dependencies. Debian or Gentoo, on the other hand, will handle the dependencies for you.

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq!

Gentoo. Definitely.

It has step by step instructions for install and you learn a heck of a lot on the way.

I would still be using it if I hadn't sold that system to get out of debt.

Debt sucks. I've always wanted to try Gentoo again (my first try didn't go well because there were bugs in some of the setup scripts and my celery 500 had already spent a day and a half compiling), but my debian works so well I really have no reason. I need to get another HD and try it.

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Brian's Web Log is CLOSED.

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There is no signature

I'm using Mandrake b/c I want something fast (It hauls a** compared to redhat) and something
that doesn't force me to do any tweaking that I don't want to do. The whole point of having a good operating system IMO, is to get work done, not piss away time tweaking it all day.



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I have found that you can transform your character solely by the power of belief: as you believe yourself to be, so you shall become over time.

Anything else will haul *** compared to Mandrake. I started with Mandrake too, then tried Slack, Knoppix/Debian and Gentoo. Gentoo definitely was the fastest and the best (NEVER had a problem with it, except for my ATI card, which someone here helped me fix). Debian is also a GREAT distro.

And listen to GBK. Having a program solve the dependencies for you is awesome. Like let's say you had a game that needed a specific 3D graphics library. In RH/Mandrake you would download the RPM for the game, run it and would get an error message, saying that the library is missing. Then you hunt down the RPM for that, then install it, finding that it TOO is dependent on the presence of something else. In Debian, it's all simple as "apt-get install game" and in Gentoo "emerge game" (if I remember right, I haven't used Linux in a few months). It does EVERYTHING for you. No more installation hassles. Easier than Windows even

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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

I've heard that Gentoo is for advanced to hardcore users, and I still consider myself les than proficient at linux. The GUI is easy, but console based stuff really slows me down. and working with Bash -- well, forget about that.

Debian is good (it's the parent distro of knoppix, after all) But i've heard that it is an absolute b**** to install. is that true?


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I have found that you can transform your character solely by the power of belief: as you believe yourself to be, so you shall become over time.

[This message has been edited by Pagewizard_YKS (edited August 03, 2004).]

If you want an easier, but slightly dumbed down install of Debian, try Kanotix. http://www.kanotix.com

Kanotix is a live-cd, but it is also very good for HD-installs. It is basically an improved knoppix. Kano will usually answer most of your questions in the forum, and you can find plenty of his awesome scripts here to assist your kanotix experience. http://kanotix.com/files/

I just installed SuSE 9.1, and I really like it. It has a very very very easy install. The only thing I had trouble with is finding drivers for my Microsoft WirelessG USB2.0 Wireless Adapter, and I highly doubt there will be any Linux drivers for that. So, I'll just have run a cable up from my basement. Otherwsie, I'm loving it. I did hear though that Microsoft Wireless USB Adapters are actually built the same as D-Link, and if you find a matching adapter, you can try it. And now I'm talking to myself...

One of my favorite things is that they let you download a Live-Eval CD, so you can run it from a CD and test it out before you even install it. They also let you download the Personal Edition free.

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"His Will Was Set, And Only Death Would Break It"

"None knows what the new day shall bring him"

[This message has been edited by mscbuck (edited August 03, 2004).]

I know that FreeBSD has NDIS support (which allows one to use Windows drivers for their wireless cards under FreeBSD). There might be an NDIS driver under Linux that allows this as well.

If you like Linux, I'd suggest Gentoo, Debian, or Slackware. However, I only run BSD boxes, so I really can't get into specifics about Linux.

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[This message has been edited. Deal with it.]

Good luck with the Mandrake. I just hope you dont die from the lethal scream...

<_<

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"Guns don't kill people, I kill people."

You might be able to use ndiswrapper to use the Windows driver under Linux. That's how I got my D-Link Air B card working in Linux.

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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

Nope. From what Ive read, it doesnt work with the MS adapter...

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Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
:wq!

Damn [edit] Kind of funny how the MS adapter won't work in Linux...

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When guitars are outlawed, only outlaws will have guitars.

[This message has been edited by MaD CoW (edited August 04, 2004).]