Linux Problem; Linux_guru, someone please help

[Mighty Joe]

I just installed mandrake 8.0 on my system. I'm impressed. My system is set up this way.

One thing is that i encountered is that this computer has an asound sound card, the als 4000. It doesn't show that it's supported by linux but some of their other cards are. Would those drivers work for this?

But the main problem...I had a C partition (3 gigs for boot files and temp files) 4 gigs on D for windows 98, and E had 5 gigs for win2k pro. I only read guru's "how to..." after i installed it on my C drive, resizing the windows partition to 1 gig and then auto allocating the other two gigs for mandrake. mandrake runs fine but when i select windows from the lilo boot loader and it takes me to the win2k boot loader, but both win 98 and 2000 says the main file not found. Sorry for my ignorance. New to this linux world. How do i know what to enter into the boot file like the hdb# that win98 and 2000 are on. I see them in my mount folder in linux and it's all accessible but i can't get the os to load up. Do I have to wipe it all out? please help.

[Mighty Joe]

I'm even willing to just boot mandrake from the floppy. Thanks.

[CMonster]

It's hard to tell just exactly what will work since your computer is not sitting directly in front of me. Getting Win98 to boot should be fairly easy but Win2K may be a different story Most likely Win2k isn't aware of the partition changes and is confused. Recovery may also depend a great deal on which you installed first Win2k or Win98. Here are a few things you might try:

1. First of all created a boot disk in Mandrake if you didn't do it when installing.


2. Boot the Windows 2000 CD and when the setup program begins follow the prompts and choose recovery by pressing <R> from there you can press <M> for manual recovery or press <F> for fast recovery, you can also use the Recovery Console by pressing <C> then type in FIXBOOT and press enter (do a web search for other Recovery Console commands -I'm not going to list them all here).

If your repair attempts kill the Mandrake bootloader at least you can get back in with that boot disk from step #1. Remember you can reinstall the Linux bootloader anytime.

3. If the above failed, you should at least be able to boot Win98 by booting from a Win98 startup disk, type fdisk /mbr and hit <enter>. The Linux loader will be purged from the mbr and replaced with Win98 -now you can boot 98 at least. You should then at least be able to reinstall the Linux loader and have it dual boot Win98 and Linux.

Worst case: copy important files from Windows using Mandrake Linux, then reinstall Windows.

best of Luck to ya.

[Mighty Joe]

Thanks for the words of wisdom Cmonster. I tried to do the win2k fix from the console but still wouldn't work on boot up, so i just wiped it all out cuz i had already made a backup. It's not my primary computer. So i repartitioned it to c for boot files (1 gig) d: for win 98 (1 gig; don't use much) and windows 2000 on e: with 8 gig's. I've left an f: drive with 2 gigs unformated and thinking of just using that for mandrake. My question is this: can i have the original win2k loader up, and just access mandrake via the boot disk? What are my options or if i had to restructure it, what should I do? Thanks again.

[Mighty Joe]

Update: Well i wiped the system out and put mandrake on the F partition. It runs flawlessly. One question however is that is windows supposed to be able to read the files from Linux? Linuz sees all the windows files. Why is that?

[pbharris]

i have heard there are utilites to see the plinux partition, i tried one out about 4 years ago, but since i am usually in linux i don't personally have a need. try a google search for ext2 + windows

[linux_guru]

As far as I know, windoze cant (wont) read Linux partitions. M$ are not about to add in support for their main rival now are they ?

Linux however, will read/write to MSDOS and FAT32 filesystems. At this stage NTFS will be read only to Linux.

[This message has been edited by linux_guru (edited 07-24-2001).]

[Mighty Joe]

Thanks for all the help everyone. It's not a big deal. I think this OS is very nice. I'm gona install star office today and see how it is. Thanks again.

Joe