Mandravia boot loader problems

tekkie2412 · #1 November 14th, 2005, 07:50 AM

Ok, I decided to give linux a try... I tried Mandravia for the last week, then tonight I went to try fedora core 4. Installation went fine, no error messages. At the end of the installation I clicked the button to reboot. Probably 5 pages of text flash by quickly, then I see the boot loader from Mandravia again witht he options "linux... linuxfb... failsafe... windows..." I pick linux, the progress bar fills up to the end then I get a kernal error "Try init command" or something like that. Im guessing, since I have WinXP on one drive, that the boot loader is on the MBR somewhere. Any idea how I can change this and why the madravia boot loader is still there after I deleted the partition?

**kage** · #2 November 14th, 2005, 06:51 PM

If you have two hard drives, try booting from the other one (there is an option in your bios). When you installed fedora, did you choose to install the boot loader (grub) to the MBR? You might have to reinstall/repair it, check the links in my sig.

tekkie2412 · #3 November 14th, 2005, 07:09 PM

When I was installing mandravia, I dont remember having the option of choosing a boot loader, but when I restarted it later it was there. When I installed fedora, I did see the option to install grub, and I did, but it still loads to the mandravia loader. I will try switching boot priority in CMOS when I get home, if that doesnt work though I think Im SOL as I cant get to any terminals. I'll post some screen shots of the error message later tonight too if I can.

tekkie2412 · #4 November 15th, 2005, 06:51 AM

ok, here's the exact error message Im getting. "Kernal Panic - not syncing: No init found"

tekkie2412 · #5 November 15th, 2005, 03:39 PM

ok, I got to the grub command and typed "setup (hd0). Now fedora loads great but... I seem to have kicked windows out of the boot record now. Another problem for another day

**kage** · #6 November 15th, 2005, 06:28 PM

Ah. If you know what partition windows is installed on (such as /dev/hda1) then you can edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add a line like:

title Windows XP
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

That will add a 'Windows' option to grub. Now if you don't know what partition windows is on, the output of 'fdisk -l' will show you.

Hope that helps.

tekkie2412 · #7 November 15th, 2005, 08:23 PM

I went in to the grub.conf and added what you said, seems to work fine.
Thanks for all youre help

**kage** · #8 November 16th, 2005, 02:32 AM

Awesome, glad it worked for you.

-kage

tekkie2412 · #9 November 16th, 2005, 04:21 AM

Ok, I didnt want to start another thread for this but... I have time to play with fedora for the first time now, I installed wine, then went to install a game thats around 600 MB large. When I open the setup file with wine it read the package then says "there isnt enough room on drive C: to install" Its a small hd, 40 GB, but when I look in filesystem is says 30.4 GB free. When I look at the partition it says 38k bytes on the partition. When Im running windows, its running off of C:, could it be that linux is trying to save to an ntfs system and its giving it problems?

**kage** · #10 November 16th, 2005, 04:06 PM

With wine, it is not using your literal C:, but instead a 'fake' C: that is under your /home directory, something like /home/user/.wine/msdos/C. How big is your fedora partition? If you open up a terminal, and type 'df' it will show you how much space is left on your drive.

tekkie2412 · #11 November 16th, 2005, 05:06 PM

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
35740376 2058908 31836632 7% /
/dev/hdb1 101086 10051 85816 11% /boot
/dev/shm 517224 0 517224 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdc 355946 355946 0 100% /media/cdrecorder1

Lots left. I set the whole partition to linux

**kage** · #12 November 16th, 2005, 05:22 PM

Yeah. Is wine setup to use a filesystem that doesnt exist, perhaps? When you configured it, where did you set it to use C: at?

tekkie2412 · #13 November 16th, 2005, 05:49 PM

actually, it was a one click rpm, I didnt have to configure anything. I think it might actually be working now though. I went to /usr/bin/ and ran winefile and ran the install from there. I didnt get any error messages and the progress bar is moving (although extremely slowly). What I was doing before was opening the CD, right clicking on the setup file, and chooseing "Open with 'wine windows emulator'". Maybe it wasnt passing an argument or something. I'll let you know if it works after install

tekkie2412 · #14 November 16th, 2005, 06:03 PM

well it installed, now its saying I "need an activeX browser object but mozilla activeX control is not installed". So it downloads automatically from winehq.org, then it asks me to locate my mozilla layout files. I have no idea where they are but I will have to mess with it later, time for work

edit: I found some stuff at http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/ I can try if work ever lets me go home tonight.

**smurfy** · #15 November 17th, 2005, 10:02 AM

Hi, what game is it?

Can you post the content of your home/username/.wine/config file?