Hi, First and foremost, I would like to apologise for the lengthy mail, but I am sure those that are willing to help me will find the info. important. Please note that there may be some incorrections because I am on another location/machine at the moment and am writing this from some notes I took at the time.
I am newbie at Linux/Unix and attempted to install Mandrake Liniux 8.1 on a AMD 200+ with 64 Mbytes of RAM and two volumes (4 and 1.5 Giba respectivelly). On volume 1 I hada (have?): a) Dos partition of 100 MBytes (for booting) b) FAT 32 w/ Win95 (+/- 2G) c) NTFS (a little less than 2G) On volume 2 was: a) Free for Linux (/dev/hdb) I proceeded with the install and made a boot floppy as per indications and placed the LILO on a dev/hdba1 (dos). Please note that I had attempted installing RedHat Linux on volume 2 and got it working using the loadlin boot (from Win95). I gave up though, because I could not install my devices (hence the install w/ Mandrake 8-}). The Linux volume is partitioned as follows: a) 1.3 Giga for "/" b) 78 Mega for "/swap" c) 131 Mega for "/home" The boot from dev/hdb1 worked fine. The only problem is I lost my NT boot. Lilo indicated 2 OSs: dos and NT. When I select dos, the NT's booting application runs. I then select windows 95 and this executes and boots w/ no problem. When I select NT from either Lilo's on boot.ini's menus, NT fails to boot because NTDETEC fails. Before proceeding with a replacement of the MBR or a reinstalation of NT I tried booting with the floppy. I wanted to do this not to "waste" another 2 days installing Linux (2 attempts on a very slooooow machine). This failed! The Lilo session error message is as follows: SysLinux 1.48 MandrakeLinux Copyright 1994-1999... ...boot your LinuxMandrake system from /dev/hdb1... Could not find ramdisk image: initrd.img I atempted to use Mandrake's control center and I also executed the command manually. Any of these attempts produced the same result: the file initrd.img was in the floppy but with size 0. (After some searching) I then proceeded with: mkinitrd --omit-scsi-modules --omit-raid-modules -v 2.4.8-26mdk This generated a initrd.img file which I then copied to the floppy. This worked fine. I can actually boot. When I execute. mkbootdisk --verbose --mkinitrarga --omit-scsi-modules --mkinitrarga --omit- raid-modules --mkinitrarga -v -- device /dev/fd0 --compact 2.4.8-26mdk I get the following result: formatting /dev/fd0... done copy /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.8-26mdk... done Creating initrd image... Rootfs is not ext3, there is no rootfs special options, and no modules are needed-- not building initrd image. done. setting up syslinux... done. Question(s): what am I doing wrong? Is this an indication of more problems? BTW, the machine using KDE seems very sluggish, especially on application booting and I have not been able to isntall all devices (more on that in another e-mail). TIA. Hugo
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