On Tue, 2002-07-16 at 08:27, Hansen Loke wrote:
> > Problems that span several OSs are often hardware related.
> I hope its not that serious, since Windows 98 is working ok. Maybe partitions for
> Windows 2000 and Linux is corrupted?
Possibly...
> > Next I'd look into the way the drive is partitioned. How did you
> > install the second OS? How did you repartition to make space? Are you
> > using UMSDOS or something? Which partitions are NTFS and which are
> > FATxx? Where is lilo installed? How old is the computer? How big is
> > the drive? Do you have SMART enabled in the BIOS ?
>
> I installed Windows 98 into C:, primary partition, then installed Windows 2000 into
>d:,
> extended partition with first logical drive, and Linux is installed into e:, extended
> partition with second logical drive.All these partitions, plus a 30Gb FAT32 partition
> is located into the same hard drive.
Okay - that sounds good... I thought that maybe you'd used something
like fips or partition magic to resize an existing partition.
> I've done the partitions using FDISK.
> Haven't heard of UMSDOS so can't be using it.
Its a kludge that lets the user install linux on the same partition as
windows... quite messy.
> The computer is about 1-2 years old. AMD K6-2 500MHz, 186Mb RAM, 1st HD is brand new
> 40Gb, 2nd HD is 8Gb.
This was to see if the machine was likely to have any hardware issues
with the bigger 40 Gb drive.
> I think I might have enabled SMART using a program somwhere in the computer.
> If you need more details to solve the problem just let me know.
SMART is a feature of some hard drives that permits them to report on
impending failure. It isn't required, but sometimes can pre-warn you of
a problem.
> BTW, if worst comes to worst, is there a way to uninstall Linux (and reinstall it)?
Simply format the partition as part of installing it the second time.
Some things to try - with linux running, tail some of the files in
/var/log like syslog and daemon and so on. dmesg | more might contain
some useful information too. Errors like this
VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
may be indicative of a problem - see what you see.
Run top and see if theres some really greedy process running, and run
free to see if the right amount of ram is reported.
cat /proc/cpuinfo and confirm that it knows about your CPU correctly -
were there any issues with the K6 CPU that required special software to
fix?
As a last resort - try taking it to the installfest, and get a bunch of
expert help.
