On Wed, 2002-07-10 at 16:10, Joe Harkins wrote:
> 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 . . .

OK I did/will.

> 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.

First thing: Ditch PM.  See the newbie archives for my own woes with
that POS Partitioning software (shitware?).  It gave similiar errors to
the ones you describe later on, YET linux & winsucks both had 0 problems
with the drives in question.  Ditto for the partitions.  This leads me
to suspect PM uses some sort of proprietary partitioning schemes.  I
don't know here, I'm guessing.  Juse use MDK's partitioning stuff &
you'll be fine.

> 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.)

This is an "expert" or "newbie" install?  need some specifics.

> 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]$
> 

Normal command line prompt.  It expects *like a DOS prompt* information
to be input here.

> 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.

Heh next time to reboot try ALT-SYSRQ (ya that useless button actually has a use in 
LINUX ! OMG!)-L,
or H next time.

 <giant snip>
> "Segmentation fault; seems like memory is missing as the install crashes" 
> (That must as have been written buy a non-English speaker)

Trust me M$hit's error msgs mean just as much.  Segfault=BSOD for winsucks. 
> And when I hit enter a second text message mixes in with the previous 
> message and says "switch to console f2 for a shell."

In other words, if you think you know what you're doing, hit ctrl-alt-F2
for cmd line so you can fix your fooked up linux install. :)
 
> 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.
> 
As I said, PM lies. Plain & simple.

> 
> 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

Keep up the dialogue i'm sure in time some of us will be able to get you
up & running again.

Femme


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