Cant Boot Mandrake

[eye_smell]

Just installed Mandrake 9.1 this afternoon and have been trying all day to get it to boot. LILO wouldn't work apparently because Linux is installed in the second partition on my secnod hard drive. I am very new to Linux. Can someone give me detailed intructions on how to boot Linux from a floppy, or if anyone has any other suggestions please help.

Thank you

[coppicat]

I'm new to Linux too- but just a suggestion- maybe you need to give more information, such as

1) Did you make a boot floppy during installation?
2) Where did you install Lilo? Just the default (master boot record- mbr) or in your root partition etc...
3) Do you know the designation of your hard drives ie hda hdb or whatever
4) When you say it won't boot- are you getting a graphical login screen, a command line prompt with a $ sign, or just a black screen?

If you are getting some kind of Lilo login, that would suggest it's a matter of configuring a few things, but if NOTHING happens- well that's a different story. Can you still boot into Windows or whatever you've got elsewhere?

Maybe you should edit the title of your post to something like "Mandrake 9.1: 2 hard drives boot problem"- ("won't boot " doesn't tell us much....)

If you don't have a boot floppy you might be able to re-run the installation as an "upgrade", choose so-called expert mode and make a boot floppy when prompted. You can try skipping the packages since one would hope they are already installed. Also, if the problem is that you can't get into "X" which is the graphical user interface, it could be that X isn't configured properly. If the test doesn't work during installation you might have to go back and try different drivers- often you can get things to work initially by choosing a generic "vesa" or something similar.

Good luck, anyway!:)

[mdwatts]

Have a look at this thread (http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=105836) just a few down from yours.

Look for my suggestion for map-drive as you will likely need to use that if Linux is installed on the second HD with Lilo in the mbr of the primary/master drive.

[eye_smell]

Thank you guys very much, i pretty much sorted out the problem by reinstalling it on my first drive, its not exactly the way I wanted it (and it got rid of windows) but atleast i can use now. BTW the error message it was giving me was Lilo checksum error (or something of the sort)

Again thanks to everyone for helping

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by eye_smell
TI pretty much sorted out the problem by reinstalling it on my first drive, its not exactly the way I wanted it (and it got rid of windows) but atleast i can use now. BTW the error message it was giving me was Lilo checksum error (or something of the sort)



That's one way to fix it though we might have been able to fix the original problem with a bit of Lilo configuration changes.

Enjoy ...