I'm having a very weird trip trying to install Mandrake 8.2 on the secod HD on this box. I'm running WINxp on the primary drive and want Mandrake on the smaller (6 gigs).
I have had many weird things occur, some that seem impossible. It's hard to figure out which are significant so I that would lead to a sound diagnosis and relevant guidance. But if you are patient and enjoy a strange tale, please follow this . . . First, I installed Partition Magic on the WIN HD in order to make sure the HD for which Mandrake was intended is OK. Maybe the issues raised at that point are clues to problems that have come up during many subsequent attempts to install M 8.2. On opening PM, it checked the HDs and reported it (on the smaller drive) a series of 3 errror #116 which it offered to fix and apparently did. PM then reported the primary drive with WIN XP ok but described the smaller HD as BAD with an error #108. An attempt to format the drive ended in "error 04 bad argument/parameter" and PM reports "unable to format drive." (the one for which Mandrake is intended. I proceeded to boot into M 8.2 installation from the CD. I auto-allocated the partitions (/ - swap and /home) and installed M 8.2 in the "/" partition (later I tried it in the "/home" partition with no different results.) All went normally until I got to the grinning penguins. The display seemed normal. As soon as I clicked that I could see the penguins the system crashed, leaving me a smear of the penguin color across the screen. The machine was hung and needed a manual reboot. As I said, I tried it in the other partition. Same results. So I went to the linuxnebie forum with this situation and the answer suggested that I try a "text" installation. I did. It too went normally. When it came to the end, I was prompted to enter my user and password. I did. It was followed by a prompt that said [joeharkins@localhost joeharkins]$ And that was that. I have no clue as to what it wanted. Nothing that I could think of worked except ctrl-alt-del which I finally used to get out. Then I tried yet another install, again on the "/" partition. on the 3rd try (here come the wild and hairy part) - just as I was about to key in the user PW I got a blue screen that then became the Mandrake First Time welcome dialog in graphic mode. It prompted me to repeat my user name and pw as well as the Internet connection stuff I'd previous entered. So I complied. KDE opened up. I was in! I moved around inside KDE. Looked at all the goodies. Reset the screen res to 800 by 600 (I'd not been prompted to choose one during install). Then opened Gnome. looked around there - but (first problem) I could not get the modem to dial. The error message suggested that it was a user/pw problem but that seems strange since it never even gave back a dial tone so it confuses me how it could be unable to make a connection due to a user/pw problem. Anyway, I shut down the sys (logging out properly of course) and rebooted into WINxp so i could send email. Then I rebooted back into Gnome again. (Top of the world, Ma!) This time (hold on!! - curve ahead) upon reaching the login prompt I only got as far as the final keystroke of the user name. at that point the sys opened Gnome (which I'd set as default before ending the first session) - without asking for a password. But since I was in, I looked around some more. Studied the obscurities of the connection dialog boxes and then shut down for the night, again logging out properly . When I rebooted in the morning through the boot loader, I was taken back to that DOS-like prompt. This time I did not even get to finish keying in the user name when the sys opened into Gnome. (see what I mean about weird?). Again, I looked around in Gnome, opened and closed the menus, etc., but changed nothing anywhere. I eventually logged out and went back to working in WIn for a while. And that's the last time I was able to get into the Linux opsys. I have tried all the above installs. The text install into either partition leads to that meaningless (to me) prompt but this time there was no magical opening of the door. Never could get past it again. And, of course, the graphic install leads me to that penguin smear. During some of the final attempts at reinstall I saw at least one dialog box that did not appear during previous installs. For example, in one I was prompted for the screen res. I choose 600 by 800 and when the penguins came again, they were in that res - just before the color smear.. The final two attempts at text installs ended with error messages not previously seen . . . "Segmentation fault; seems like memory is missing as the install crashes" (That must as have been written buy a non-English speaker) And when I hit enter a second text message mixes in with the previous message and says "switch to console f2 for a shell." Of course, none of that is of any help to me because the machine is hung and no keys are functional. Until all of this happened, I ran the smaller HD under WIN 98 as drives D,E, and F with G as the CD. So I believe the HD to be sound - even though Partition Magic says it has problems. But the mystery is, how come I had a functional installation of mandrake 8.2 for at least 3 sessions and then it went away and I can't install it again? Hope you enjoyed the trip and I hope even stronger that you have some ideas for fixing the problem. I'd greatly appreciate it. I was impressed by the little I saw but wish i could have enjoyed it longer and more consistently. TIA
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