Another Freeze Issue

[Cadwgawn]

I've tried partitioning my hard drive a number of ways, and every time I get the same problem. When I put in my Mandrake 9.0 install disk and hit enter. It goes through quite a bit of lines, but when I get to

Partition check:
hda:

it seems to just freeze up with the cursor blinking at the end of hda:
I've let it sit for an hour and a half with nothing, but the HDD light on the front of my ccomputer remains lit. What did I do?

[jetblackz]

List the specs and OSes on the box
What tool did you use for partitioning?

[Cadwgawn]

AMD K6-2
64Mb ram
30 Gig HD
used Partition Magic
500Mb Linux swap Partition up front
6Gig Linux Ext2 partition in the Middle
Windows 98 partition at the back.

[mdwatts]

Does 64mb meet the minimum memory requirements for Mandrake 9.0?

That is a strange partition setup.

You have a extended partition at the beginning of the drive that contains swap and the Linux logical partitions and then Win98 after that as a primary?

Usually Windows is at the beginning of the drive as a primary and then Linux can be installed in either other primaries or logicals within the extended.

[Cadwgawn]

I believe 64 is the bare minimum. I purchased a 128Meg stick, but the site I ordered from sent my 256 witch my BIOS won't support. I tried Partitioning my hard drive like you said to no avail. I decided to try the new partitioning setup just to see what happens. As you can tell My box didn't like that either. When running a dual boot system do both OSes have to be on the primary HD or just the Primary IDE Cable? I was thinking of picking up another hard drive when I get the ram, but I wasn't sure how to set it up.

[Cadwgawn]

Double checked the Mandrake Website. 64Mb is the minimum.

[mdwatts]

You can install as many operating systems on the same HD as you have the space for.

Check your bios settings and see if you can disable power management and dma.

You can pass options at the initial installer prompt that may help.

nodma

noapic

noacpi

Mandrake should have a list of the options you can use on their website.

[Cadwgawn]

Okay. I bought a new hard drive and doubled my ram(things I had planned for some time now.) My master hard drive is now an 80gig. I used fdisk to make a 40 Gig fat32 partition and left the other half unallocated. The slave drive(my old 40Gig) is purely fat32 media storage. I tried to install Mandrake Linux once again and it everything was fine on the master drive, but it froze again on the slave (the original problem drive) I guess this must be an unsupported drive or something. Considering this box is Frankenstein's Compaq, this doesn't suprise me. Is there a way that I can just bypass the install trying to check it? perhaps using Partition Magic to make it hidden? BTW, thanks for all of your help mdwatts. It is VERY appreciated.

[jetblackz]

Newer PM lets you move and clone partitions.

The ideal setup would be:
hda1, 10gig, fat32
hda2, 10gig, ext3
hda3, 20gig, fat32 for file sharing between OSes

Right-click on My Doc in 98 and move things to D:\My Documents, yes to move

Why an extra? Cuz chances are you will screw up Windows somewhere down the road. If that happens, you files would be safe.

A better solution would be putting the new 40gig as hdb fat32 entirely for file storage/sharing.

As for freezing up, try passing this to boot prompt,

mem=nopentium

Go on booting.

[Cadwgawn]

Well, I'm still having problems, but the good news is I have Linux up and running. I'm going to play around for a week or two, see if I can't work out this drive issue. But thank you both jetblackz, and mdwatts. I appreciate it.