Linux does not boot

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Negatratoron
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Linux does not boot

Post by Negatratoron »

I know that there are af we people here who know quite a bit about Linux, so I'm going to just see what happens. I have Linux on a PATA drive. I have Windows XP on a SATA drive. I have installed GRUB on the MBR and everything, and it doesn't boot. Please look at http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthrea ... post600869 for details before posting.

Thank you.
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Post by FunkyStickman »

As having run a dual-boot setup before (with SATA and PATA drives) the problem is that GRUB isn't installed on the default boot device. Yes, you need to install it on the MBR of the Windows drive. This won't kill windows, as long as you keep a \"chainloader +1\" entry in there for Windows. You can always return the Windows MBR back the way it was with a windows boot floppy and running \"fdisk /mbr\".

Linux determines device names kinda weird... when I had my setup, I used a SATA card. Without the card, the drives were hda, hdb, hdc, and hdd. Once I added the card, the SATA became hda and hdc (no b or d because each SATA drive uses a whole ATA channel) and the on-board connectors were changed to hde, hdf, hfg, and hgh. This caused huge headaches, until I figured it all out. On top of that, I added a PCI ATA controller, which moved everything again... Linux detected the SATA card first, then the ATA card, and then the motherboard. I wound up with a, c, d, e, f, g, and the motherboard was h, i, j, and k. It took a little fiddling, but I got it all straightened out eventually.

Just installing GRUB on the Linux drive doesn't change the motherboard's default boot drive preference. You should be able to install grub to the Windows drive MBR, and if the boot entries are right, it should work.
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Post by DCrazy »

If the SATA controller is on your motherboard, see if there's an option in your BIOS to drive it in PATA compatibility mode. GRUB needs to be installed in the MBR of whichever drive is considered the primary, as Funky says, but PATA compatibility mode might help, especially if Fedora's kernel is lacking proper SATA support.

Try booting from a live CD with compatibility mode enabled and see which drives are recognized as what.
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Post by Negatratoron »

The FC5 DVD has SATA support. The FC4 DVD didn't, but I'm not using that one, so it doesn't matter. Anyway, I installed GRUB on the SATA drive and got the message, \"GRUB Loading stage1_5Read Error\". I looked in the /boot/grub folder in good ole linux rescue, and found a whole raft of \"[filesystem]_stage1_5\" files, including \"fat_stage1_5\", \"e2fs_stage1_5\", and so on, but nothing that looked like NTFS. I need to go find a file for NTFS. It's time for Google!
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Post by fliptw »

did you setup grub for (hd0,0), or (hd0)?

did you give it the correct root command when setting up grub?

if you used (hd0,0), then it would be ignored, as you've installed grub onto the boot sector of the first partiton, not the MBR.
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Post by Negatratoron »

The SATA drive is hd1, and yes, I did use do setup (hd1). I first used root (hd0,0), with hd0,0 being the boot partition that Linux made during the installation. GRUB can not mount the NTFS file system. There was some kind of \"unknown file system\" error or something when I tried root (hd1). I'm now going to try again, and do the entire mess at once. Maybe all of the restarting and configuring that occurred in between grub-install --recheck /dev/sda and setup (hd1) somehow made it not work.
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Post by fliptw »

grub orders the drives in boot order - the drive that the bios is set to boot off of is always hd0, and you need to have a comma in anything that root uses (hd1,0), not (hd1).

give us a listing of your partitions.
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Post by Negatratoron »

About the partition layout:
device.map consists of:
(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/hda
(hd1) /dev/sda

I have two partitions in /dev/hda. The installer figured out the hda partitioning. The first partition has the ext3 file system, and its mount point is /boot. The second partition has some kind of \"Linux LVM\" file system or something, and its mount point is /.

/dev/sda has one partition. The file system is NTFS. For some reason, I couldn't add a mount point during installation.

I did a \"root (hd1,0)\" and got the same result about the unknown file system.

Thank you.
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Post by fliptw »

try this:

root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
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Post by Negatratoron »

Actually, that was one of the first things that I tried. I'm going to dive right in to the GRUB documentation.

Thank you for helping.
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Post by Xamindar »

Did you ever get this resolved? I kind of skimmed your two threads and am trying to understand what the exact problem is. When you boot does grub come up at all? Does it at least get you to a grub prompt?

There are also instances where for whatever reason grub will not work with a motherboard. I had it once with an old scsi pentium server. In that case I had to just use lilo. It doesn't matter which one you use, they both do the same thing. But they both are configured very differently.

Post your /boot/grub/grub.conf if you are able to(it might be menu.1st). I will try to help as much as possible. I also have a setup where grub boots up a linux with root on LVM which in that case needs some special commands.

One thing to remember about grub...It aleays orders the drives based on what the bios says. The bios boot drive/mbr is always hd0,0.
Why doesn't it work?
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Post by Negatratoron »

No, I did not get this problem solved. When I boot the computer, before any sort of GRUB prompt or anything, the error, \"stage1.5Read error\" is displayed. It is the first and only message that gets displayed after the computer finishes asking the CD drive if there's something bootable in it (the CD drive comes before the hard drives in the BIOS boot order).

Right now, I think that I somehow corrupted the XP file system, and I'm working on recovering it. I sent an email to Microsoft about that.

And here comes the rant about the computer:

Some people who I know seem to think that computers are magic machines that always work. I just wish they were right. After I learned that computers didn't always work perfectly, I started fiddling with settings. I then learned that computers never work perfectly, but you can usually get pretty close. Then, when I started fiddling with really dangerous stuff like GRUB, MBR's, and building my own computer, I learned that computers really aren't as stable as they look. If you want to, it is painfully easy to break a computer. Maybe it's just the fact that I have no practice building computers, but I am sick and tired of needing to do all this troubleshooting to get it to work. Most of my troubleshooting and such comes from Google, but forums, and especially \"customer support\", help tremendously. It seems so helpless and hopeless... I have had plenty of troubleshooting adventures before that never entered this forum; they never needed to. What's-his-name (\"Judas\" or something. I don't pay attention to how to spell names. As long as every name looks different, which they do, spelling is irrelevant), who I talked with yesterday, really helped, but I am just so tired with this technical nonsense... I just want to give up for a few days.

And here ends the rant about the computer.

If I don't reply again until September 5th or so, I didn't give up completely or send the computer to some repair place. I'm just taking a well-earned break and putting my brain back together. Please reply to this thread with any ideas that you may have. I know that I will be able to solve this problem, just like I have solved every other problem, but first I need to let the frustration cool down a bit.

Thank you.
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Post by Negatratoron »

I'm ready! I decided that since school starts on Tuesday, I'd better get this computer working quickly. To Gre'thor with Windows! The SATA hard drive (with Windows: the bad operating sytem) is not plugged in right now, and I am not going to plug it in until Linux (the good operating system) is installed and stable enough to take a few hits in the MBR and still boot. :) Anyway, the current error is as follows: \"Disk boot failure. Instert system disk and press enter.\" This error reared its ugly head once more after I rebooted the computer after installing Linux. If this is a BIOS issue (which, from my Google searches, it likely is), I'll send another email to Biostar (which I will do when I finish this post), and see if they can help. I'm not quite sure if BIOS is an easy way to solve it, because I tried using the BIOS from the website, the first specail BIOS update, and the second special BIOS update, and none of them worked. It will be a lot easier to deal with this MBR stuff without going insane again if I know that there's a nice, stable operating system that I can use even if I totally destroy the SATA hard drive and its MBR. :D

Please refrain from suggesting anything that would destroy the Windows installation on the SATA drive beyond any hope of recovery. I have Maya, the Vex programming kit, Adobe CS2, and maybe one or two other things registered on that hard drive, and I don't think it would be easy to register some of 'em again. Maya, in particular, could be a real pain.

Thank you.
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Post by Xamindar »

Negatratoron wrote:"Disk boot failure. Instert system disk and press enter."
Usually means that none of the bootable drives have a bootloader. So either for some reason your bios is not able to boot off your remaining hard drive or there is no boot loader (grub) on that drive.

If no boot loader and you know linux is still installed on that drive the fastest thing to do is boot your live cd and go to a prompt and reinstall grub in the mbr.
Do that by first finding out where your grub.conf file is and where it is located. Then execute "grub".

You should be at the grub prompt and now you need to type the following to install it:

Code: Select all

grub> root (hd0,0)    (Specify where your /boot partition resides)
grub> setup (hd0)     (Install GRUB in the MBR)
grub> quit            (Exit the GRUB shell)
Your boot partition might not be (hd0,0) so double-check. Mine is (hd0,2) for example. That first command is to specify where your "/grub/grub.conf" file will be because grub will need to look at that on every boot to determine all the boot settings.
Why doesn't it work?
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Post by Negatratoron »

I don't have time to reinstall grub now; I'll do that tomorrow, but I would like to ask: Is it possible that the fact that the CD drive and hard drive are sharing an IDE cable could have caused them to somehow get confused with each other?

What, precisely, does grub-install do? Does it copy all of the files, such as grub.conf, and so on? GRUB couldn't read the NTFS file system (Yes, \"New Technology File System file system\" is redundant, but there isn't another way to say it. :) ), so maybe it corrputed the NTFS drive when I did a grub-install on it. fdisk -l knew that the SATA drive was NTFS, but I'm not sure if it could be mounted properly... Anyway, only the very beginning of the drive should be damaged in any event. Recovery shouldn't be too difficult.

Thank you, and I will try reinstalling GRUB tomorrow.
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Post by Xamindar »

Well, sense you said you removed the windows drive you shouldn't be thinking about an NTFS partition at all, you shouldn't have one in the computer at the moment. And yes, grub will not read your NTFS partition. In fact, Linux can't even write to it without some special program or questional patch to the kernel. What grub does to boot your windows is use that \"Chainloader\" command to forward it's control over to the windows loader on the NTFS partition. The MBR is not part of the partition so it will not affect any partitions.

Now, the CD drive and hard drive could be confused. Best way to make sure it works is to make sure to set the jumpers on the hard drive to master and the CD drive to slave and make sure the hard drive is plugged into the last connector on the cable and the CD on the middle one.

\"Grub-install\" checks your /etc/mtab I believe and tries to figure out where to install its self. You usually need to be on your already running linux system or in a chrooted environment to get it to work. That's why I suggested you use \"grub\" and do it manually. You can also use tab completion in grub to find out what you can do.
Why doesn't it work?
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Post by Negatratoron »

Nither option worked. The boot partition is, in fact, /dev/hda1, which should be translated to (hd0,0). I did root (hd0,0), then setup (hd0), and got the same error. I then took the second CD drive out of the case, plugged the power thing in, put the middle IDE connector onto the CD drive and the end one on the hard drive, and set the master/slave properly. It didn't work. It might be some hardware that's faulty. I think that this is the IDE cable that has been in the computer since the day we got it. Maybe there's some kind of boot-related pin that got damaged. I'll go replace the IDE cable... By golley, What did that guy say in the Health Inspector movie, again? Ah, Good Lord Jesus and Dale Earnhardt Jr! It worked! It worked!

/me dances around the room in great leaps of joy.

It's just crazy how often this happens. I'll go troubleshooting for days and days, getting technical help from technical people, then I'll end up fixing it myself! This is just crazy! The IDE cable?! I never would have thought! That just goes to show: When you have an idea, no matter how stupid it sounds, try it. It can't do no harm; it can only work or not work, and if it doesn't your no worse off than you were before. I'm a happy camper! If I switched the IDE cable waaaay at the beginning, I would never have needed to go through this mess, but at this point I have no business complaining. Complaining is for people who have tried everything and still can't get any juice out. That applied to me a few days ago, but now I'm going to finish the cute, little Fedora installer that did, by the way, boot properly. I might even want to reinstall XP again and... No, I'm not even going to go there. I'm done. It's over. I hope... I'll finish the installer and see what happens. Even if it totally destroys the computer, I got it to boot and that's a step in the right direction... Never mind. It worked! I just logged in! I'm now going to fiddle with Linux for the rest of the day! :D

Thank you. I must say, thank you. Really, truly, spasiba. Spaciba ochin kharasho. Ya nimnoga puneemayou porruski. Merci. J'adore l'ordinateur, or something like that. French was boring. It had too many silent letters. :) I'm doing German in high school, which, by chance, starts tomorrow. :D

btw the old ide cable was 40 wire and the new one is 80 wire
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Post by Negatratoron »

Is it safe to use Wine to run a de-corrupting/file-recovery program like http://www.runtime.org/products.htm, or better yet, may I ask if there's a Linux program that will do the same thing?

Thank you and have a nice day.
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Post by DCrazy »

No. You cannot use Wine for low-level disk modification.

That's why root made fsck.
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Post by Negatratoron »

I finished installing Linux, and when it boots for the first time after installation, it works for a little while, then freezes. When booting after that, it gets stuck at \"starting firewall\". I have tried the kernel options \"selinux=0\" with no success. After getting Linux to boot so easily (by swapping IDE cables), I can just smell victory!

Once Linux is stable, I'll likely install Windows in the really old 20GB hard drive (which I've had as long as that broken IDE cable) and repair the SATA file system via that way. It's always fun to say \"via that way\".

Thank you.
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Post by DCrazy »

Negatratoron wrote:I finished installing Linux, and when it boots for the first time after installation, it works for a little while, then freezes. When booting after that, it gets stuck at "starting firewall". I have tried the kernel options "selinux=0" with no success. After getting Linux to boot so easily (by swapping IDE cables), I can just smell victory!
That might be an artifact of your cable's problems. Try re-installing Linux.
Negatratoron wrote:Once Linux is stable, I'll likely install Windows in the really old 20GB hard drive (which I've had as long as that broken IDE cable) and repair the SATA file system via that way. It's always fun to say "via that way".

Thank you.
You sound utterly confused. First of all, there's no such thing as a "SATA file system". The file system is completely OS-dependent. You cannot repair a Linux filesystem (in Fedora's case, you're probably using ReiserFS or Reiser4, though you could very well be using ext2, ext3, or vfat) from Windows, and it is a VERY risky business repairing a Windows filesystem (FAT32 or NTFS) from Linux. You'll have to boot into Linux to repair your Linux filesystem. If you don't have a bootable CD-ROM or floppy handy, this makes for a nice catch-22, in which case reinstalling Linux is probably your easiest solution, as the installer will reformat the partition with a new filesystem anyway.

The fact that you mention both IDE cables and SATA is also slightly alarming.
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Post by Negatratoron »

I really need to work on my communication skills. What I was planning is as follows:

Assuming that the NTFS file system on the SATA hard drive is corrupted, I will either correct it from Linux or, if correcting it from Linux is dangerous (which it is, according to your post), I will install another Windows XP on the old 20GB PATA hard drive (which I plan to use as extra storage space once everything is up and running) and correct it from there. Assuming that the NTFS file system on the SATA hard drive is not corrupted, I will back up that one folder that I forgot, then add Windows XP to the boot loader list.

I just used the recovery console again, and the results of fdisk -l showed that the file system on the SATA drive is NTFS. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that the file system is not corrupted. Once Linux is up and running, I will attempt to mount the hard drive to verify that the file system is intact and back up the folder that I forgot and so on. If mounting the SATA drive or trying to fix it from Windows on the 20GB PATA drive is unsafe, please say so.

I have already reinstalled Linux about three times after switching the IDE cable, and it doesn't work.

Thank you.
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Post by fliptw »

before you go about doing this again, clear some things up for us:

1. were you planning on installing linux on the pata or the sata drive?

2. what the capacities for both?

3. are you sure your motherboard supports using the SATA drive as the primary boot device while there is an PATA drive attached?
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Post by Negatratoron »

I have two PATA drives (20GB and 120GB) and one SATA drive (300GB). Windows XP is on the SATA drive. Linux is on the 120GB PATA drive. The 20GB PATA drive is just a useful extra storage drive. In the event that the NTFS file system on the SATA drive (which has Windows XP) is corrupted, I could temporarily install another copy of Windows XP on the 20GB PATA drive, download some kind of file-system-repair software, fix the SATA drive, then remove Windows from the 20GB drive and use it for storage again. In that case, I would politely ask if anyone could recommend a way to repair a file system.

The motherboard does support booting from the SATA drive when a PATA drive is attached. Before I started installing Linux and so on, the SATA drive was booting quite happily with the 120GB PATA drive also attached.

I'm not sure if the motherboard supports booting from the PATA drive when the SATA drive is attached. I haven't tried since I replaced the IDE cable. Once Linux finishes installing again, I'll post the results.

I am currently installing Linux again, and I will see if I can disable the firewall through that \"interactive startup\" (or something) feature.

Thank you.
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Post by Xamindar »

Did you try waiting a while for the firewall script to time out and the boot up to continue? It was probably hanging up because you didn't have you ethernet device set up or something.
Why doesn't it work?
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Post by Negatratoron »

Guess what? I'm posting this from Linux. Thank you for helping, and all I need now is an email from Rick that will tell me whether it's safe to try to boot into XP.

I really hope that I'm done now. I am just going to leave Linux working and not mess with anything until December or so. :)

Actually, now that I know that Linux can be installed and booted fine, I will try to install those nVidia drivers... There may be horror stories, but I have nothing on this Linux drive that's worth protecting... Yet... [insert evil laugh]
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Post by DCrazy »

Fixing an NTFS filesystem from anything other than the copy of XP that created it is very risky, because of the way NTFS stores creator information. Though it's probably safer to do it from Linux than Windows, since Linux's ntfstools will refuse to operate on the volume if it cannot be done safely.
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Post by Xamindar »

The nvidia drivers are easy to install but the xorg.conf file can be difficult to set up. If you want any examples just let me know. Stickman runs Linux on an nvidia card as well so he might be able to offer an example too.
Why doesn't it work?
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Post by FunkyStickman »

Xamindar wrote:The nvidia drivers are easy to install but the xorg.conf file can be difficult to set up. If you want any examples just let me know. Stickman runs Linux on an nvidia card as well so he might be able to offer an example too.
Yup.
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Post by Negatratoron »

I have not yet installed the Nvidia drivers.

Linux keeps freezing on \"starting firewall\" unless I go to interactive startup. If I do interactive startup, even when I let every process (except firstboot, of course) run, the computer boots normally. Is there some kind of startup script that I can use to enable everything except firstboot?

Linux freezes at random times. Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn't work and the cursor doesn't move. I have an AMD Athlon X2 4200+ and downloaded the x86_64 version of Fedora.

When installing Fedora and when I do fdisk -l, Fedora recognizes that the Windows disk does, in fact, have an NTFS file system. It might not be corrupted after all. Windows setup may not have detected it because I messed with the MBR while getting GRUB installed. While installing Fedora, I can not add a mount point to the Windows drive. When I select the NTFS partition and push, \"edit\", the \"mount point\" text box is disabled and says, \"Not applicable\". Is it safe to manually mount the drive?

Thank you.

EDIT: I just reinstalled Linux again. It got stuck in the middle of copying files. I did a second media check. It failed. I cleaned the DVD. I did another media check. It failed. It was my last DVD.

Now I have to go buy more DVD's. :(

While waiting to get more DVD's to burn a new ISO image, I'll install Windows onto the Linux hard drive. If Windows can dectect the NTFS file system, I will then back up that one folder that I forgot, fix the Windows installation on the other drive, if possible, and by then I will likely have a new stack of DVD's to burn. I went through about 4 or 5 DVD's last time I installed Linux. :)

EDIT 2:
After the \"inspecting hardware configuration\" message is put on top of the screen, the scree turns black and the hard drive access light on the front of the box stays on continuously. I'm startin' to think that I might want to go get a PCI card with an extra PATA slot sooner than I thought. :D Whether or not it would help, it would be nice for the PATA hard drive to be the master (the only thing on its IDE cable, in fact) and to be able to plug in both CD drives.
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Post by Xamindar »

Have you tried a different cd drive? The problems you are having with the hard drive light getting stuck on when trying to install winXP and linux failing to install are both the exact problems I have had in the past when using a bad cd drive or the cd was dirty.

It could even be that your cd burner is not burning them correctly.
Why doesn't it work?
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Post by Negatratoron »

I switched CD drives. It had no effect. I switched Windows XP CD's. It still had no effect. I switched the jumpers to make the hard drive the master and the CD drive the slave. It didn't work. I plugged in the SATA drive. It didn't work. I wonder if I should switch to the really new IDE cable that came with the motherboard. It's a nice, new, never-been-used 80-wire IDE cable. Even this yellow 80-wire one that I'm using now has been in the computer for its whole life, except for the three months after I upgraded it. It didn't work.
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Post by Negatratoron »

I'm not going to install Windows for the time being. Instead, I'm installing Fedora Core 4 via the DVD that came with the Linux book. Once in Fedora 4, I'll likely burn a new FC5 CD and upgrade, but that might not be necessary. I don't know how much hardware FC4 supports. It won't take long to find out, assuming that FC4 gets installed properly.
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Post by Negatratoron »

Once again, I am typing this message from Linux. This time, I'm not going to mess with anything unless I will have over two days (namely Saturday and Sunday) to fix it when it breaks. :)

I have been using linux more than ever before, and it actually seems less stable than Windows. Maybe it would be more stable if I knew what I was doing, but sometimes Linux just crashes. At random times, everything just stops working. The screen does not change, the cursor does not move, the music player plays the same fraction of a second over and over, and so on. This usually happens when I start the third or fourth simultaneous application.

Thank you.
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Post by The Lion »

Linux can definately be unstable if you are using some kind of buggy
driver. Solving this problem can be tricky. First you need to determine
which one it is; then, you need to find an upgrade or replacement. Or,
if whatever that driver's for is not important, simply stop using it.

Unfortunately I'm no expert at tracking down a problem which causes
Linux (the kernel) to lock up. The best advice I can give is to check
some files in /var/log - maybe whatever failed was still able to write
an error message to syslog or something - or build a custom kernel
and enable only the drivers/modules you need.

Configuring, compiling, and installing Linux is quite easy once you've
done it a few times. Configuration can be done using a menu and
there is help text for almost every option. Unpack the Linux source
code to a directory of your choice (typically /usr/src), and check
out the README file, which can guide you through the process.

Other than experimental kernel modules/drivers, Linux should be
very stable even if you don't know what you're doing (simply because
*nix is designed from the ground up as a multi-user operating system,
and it should not be possible for unprivileged users to mess things
up).
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Jeff250
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Post by Jeff250 »

Experiment with other distros by using their live CD's. If you find one that works, install that one to your hard drive.
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Negatratoron
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Post by Negatratoron »

Actually, Windows XP felt unstable when I first installed it. I was recovering from spending 11 days trying to get everything to work, so once everything worked, the computer still felt fragile for a while. Linux doesn't freeze any more. I am getting a good idea of how to use \"interactive startup\" to achieve the results that I want, and what happens when I turn this process off or that process on, and so on. In other words, Linux feels a lot more stable than it used to. It doesn't crash any more, I can play audio CD's flawlessly, I have set up the email account, and so on. Now that it's stable and everything, I'm not going to mess with anything until Winter Break, when I will have 11 or 12 days to fix the computer when I accidentally break it again. :)

I am now trying to share the printer between Windows and Linux. Linux can see across the network to the Windows computer, but it can't access the printer. Windows can not see the Linux computer. I don't think that samba is set up properly. I'll keep working on it.
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Negatratoron
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Post by Negatratoron »

Problem 1:
I have the 64-bit version of Fedora. Apparently, the Adobe flash player doesn't work on 64-bit Linux. I tried installing Gnash. The error is as follows:

In file included from ogl.h:12,
from ogl.cpp:10:
tu_opengl_includes.h:56:21: error: GL/glu.h: No such file or directory

Apparently, there's some sort of OpenGL problem. This might mean that I should install those NVidia drivers, but that might wreck something.

Problem 2:
I tried to install Wine with \"Add/Remove Software\". The message:

('file /etc/udev/rules.d/60-libsane.rules from install of sane-backends-1.0.17-5.fc5.9 conflicts with file from package sane-backends-1.0.17-4', (7, '/etc/udev/rules.d/60-libsane.rules', 0L))

Suggestions that might wreck something are perfectly welcome, but I probably won't try until October 18th because there is no school from the 19th to the 23rd.

Thank you.
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Post by Admiral LSD »

Negatratoron wrote:Problem 2:
I tried to install Wine with "Add/Remove Software". The message:

('file /etc/udev/rules.d/60-libsane.rules from install of sane-backends-1.0.17-5.fc5.9 conflicts with file from package sane-backends-1.0.17-4', (7, '/etc/udev/rules.d/60-libsane.rules', 0L))
Is this an upgrade install or fresh?

Basicially what's happening is that the system is refusing to install 1.0.15-5.fc5.9 because doing so will overwrite the 1.0.17-4 version that's already installed which poses the question of just how did the (presumably) older version end up being there?
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Negatratoron
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Post by Negatratoron »

Admiral LSD wrote:
Negatratoron wrote:Problem 2:
I tried to install Wine with "Add/Remove Software". The message:

('file /etc/udev/rules.d/60-libsane.rules from install of sane-backends-1.0.17-5.fc5.9 conflicts with file from package sane-backends-1.0.17-4', (7, '/etc/udev/rules.d/60-libsane.rules', 0L))
Is this an upgrade install or fresh?

Basicially what's happening is that the system is refusing to install 1.0.15-5.fc5.9 because doing so will overwrite the 1.0.17-4 version that's already installed which poses the question of just how did the (presumably) older version end up being there?
This is not an install at all. This is using the add/remove software feature while the operating system is running.

The computer is absolutely necessary for homework, so I am not going to reinstall the operating system until the long weekend in October, when I will have enough time to get everything working again without falling behind.

Thank you.
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