Boot problem

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Hi,
Ive just installed mandriva on my laptop and now i cant boot to anything. When i turn laptop on it takes me to a command prompt for GNU GRUB v0.97 but i dont know anything about linux to go any further here. I tried my XP disc to goto recovery console but that just stops at setup is checking ya current configuration , so i cant even FIXMBR to get XP back again. Can anyone point me in the right direction. Cheers

Mick

 

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i have no idea mate - is there a safe mode?

 

on what? Linux? I havent a clue mate dont know nothing about linux. Id be happy just to get access to HDD and just format and restore me backup. Aint got a floppy drive tho so cant even use FDISK.

Mick

 

Best thing to recover a laptop is to use the recovery CDs you got/made with it. They don't need anything other than being able to boot from a CD.

It sounds as if the system didn't install GRUB properly - it should have given you a menu.

Did you install Linux on the whole drive - or resize the drive? If you resized then XP is still there.

Harry.

 

Most distro's have a recovery mechanism of one type or another built into the installer. In Debian you could choose that by hitting F1 at the initial splash screen when booting into the install cd/dvd.

Where did you choose to install GRUB on the hard drive? What is the physical configuration of your hard drive? IDE? SATA? What is the model and make of your laptop?

That both XP and Mandriva aren't booting and will not install correctly almost sounds like a hardware problem to me.

 

I sorted it ive fixed my MBR with norton, cant access linux tho

Mick

 

I already had fedora working, but wanted to install another distro, so i done that and chose not to install GRUB, as thats what i read elsewhere. Probs my fault like. I cant find detailed instructions anywhere for installing multiple distros. Was gonna try on the desktop, but thats a no go because of my SATA drives, nothing will work, and i aint got the technical skill as im new to linux lol.

Mick

 

My laptop model is HP pavilion zv5383ea.

Mick

 

What it sounds like, is when you installed Mandriva, it did not setup grub correctly thus when you were trying to boot. Grub was stopping because of an error in the conf file.

On that Command line that you had you could have typed something like this: kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz (thats just a guess btw as I dont use Mandriva and dont know how it installs things )

Once Mandriva had loaded then you could have made manual changes to the conf file fixing the problem you had

 

I am not someone who knows much about the Mandriva installer. However, most of the install disks have some form of recovery built in. Boot into the install disk and hit F1. There should be some instructions built into the disk for recovery and reinstallation of GRUB. I don't know if not allowing GRUB to install would affect the MBR on your hard drive or not but I would assume that it didn't. If you can't find a recovery section in your install cd try just reinstalling Mandriva and install GRUB this time. It should find the other OS's on your hard drive and fix your booting problem.

This is one reason I don't care for Mandrake/Mandriva. To get help specific to this distro you have to pay to join a "club" on the Mandriva site. The other reason I don't really care for it is because I installed this distro back when it was Mandrake and had nothing but problems with it. It had enough bugs in the official release that I never did get it to run right. I didn't know much then, but I couldn't get much help either. At that time they had an anonymous section to their "club" where you could get some help if you had just downloaded an ISO and installed from that. All I ever got was flamed on their site so I looked elsewhere for my version of Linux.

One forum you might try for knowledge of the Mandriva installer that has a Mandriva section in it is linuxquestions.org. It's a very large site with a lot of users from every distro so you may be able to find someone with a lot of Mandriva experience to help if what I've said doesn't help.

 

I might give it another go, but ive had problems with all of the ones ive tried so far apart from fedora core 5 which installed flawlessly. Only prob i had with this is getting wireless to work, but its a known issue with broadcom apparantly.

Mick

 

Putting Linux on a laptop is usually more difficult than putting it on a desktop. The reason being is that the hardware manufacturers release so few of their specs for their hardware. That leaves the open source community to reverse engineer everything to make Linux work on their hardware.

Laptops are area where it's a good idea to check for Linux compatibility before you try installing. However, in your case I can't even find hardware specs after Googling for your machine. I also don't see anything the linux-laptop.net site for your laptop so it's most likely not a very popular target for installing Linux.

I still think it's worth your time to try to do a recovery from the Mandriva installer though. If it works you'll have your Fedora, XP and Mandriva installs all working.

 

Seems to be easier installing on my laptop than on me desktop coz of all the problems with SATA that ive been having. Would prefer it on desktop tho coz ive got plenty of space and i could use the internet with no probs coz its wired.

Mick

 

Well, it's not all that difficult to make most wireless cards work under Linux. That's why I asked on the other thread what kernel you have and what broadcom chip you have. There is some support in the latest kernels for a broadcom chip, and even if you don't have that kernel you can still use ndiswrapper + Windows drivers to get wireless working.

In Debian, under the last couple of kernels you just have to install a program that extracts the firware from the Windows drivers to get one of the broadcom chipsets to work. That chip still won't work with wpasupplicant under this configuration so you won't have encrpytion, but you can use it. The other option is to just use ndiswrapper + XP drivers, cut the firmware out with the same tool, and then you'll have a fully functioning wireless adapter. That's what I have done on my laptop. I have two functioning wireless adapters. One is a Netgear usb adapter and the other is a builtin Broadcom 4318 wirelesss card. Both work just fine with ndiswrapper.

 

Probs is straightforward to u lol, but ya might aswell be speakin another language there mate, like i said i havent got any experience of linux so far, wouldnt know where to start ha ha

Mick

 

Mandriva used LILO by default last time I checked. Fedora Core (Red Hat) used GRUB by default.

GRUB needs to find the menu.lst file to work, or it'll just dump you to the grub> prompt, as happened to you. LILO works even if there aren't any Linux partitions on the disk, which makes it a better choice for a dual boot config, IMVHO.