Re: Dual boot problem
- From: "mayayana" <mayayanaXX1a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 01:53:26 GMT
> > It turns out that two Linux installs can, indeed,
> > cause a conflict.
> >
> > I was installing Suse after
> > Mandrake. I never did figure out for sure whether
> > the Mandrake install was confusing the Suse
> > boot loader, but I found an interesting thing
> > when booting into Mandrake: The boot would work
> > OK, and Mandrake was fine, but if I then browsed
> > to the Suse install partition, the ambiguous double
> > root mounts disoriented Mandrake. From that point on
> > Mandrake would begin to be unable to find
> > files...windows wouldn't open....if I managed to
> > get to the main menu to call the logout window,
> > that came up and worked but the text was just
> > squares. Then if I logged out it bumped me back
> > to console mode. ....Interesting.
>
> You are making me really curious about what you are doing and how.
> What you describe is more or less what we usually discard as "impossible",
> it is just not "how it works". But of course I know you are experiencing
> what you say.
Well, it's a pleasure to find a civilized response
in among those answering posts. :)
> I guess the problem is (almost certainly) the concepts and
> the terminology. Or the mental picture you are having of what goes on,
> being sufficiently different from what we would describe it as, so it
> is hard for me to translate.
>
> You say
>
> "Mandrake was fine, but if I then browsed
> to the Suse install partition, the ambiguous double
> root mounts disoriented Mandrake."
>
> What exactly do you mean by "browsed to the Suse install partition"?
>
I was trying to check, from Mandrake, what
had actually transpired on the partition where
Suse was going. So I opened a window (specifically,
I started at the "Home" shortcut) and
clicked a small icon for devices, along the left
side. (Sorry but I'm not familiar with the names
for these things yet. If I remember correctly I
had to fiddle around in the window menu in order
to get a split view - treeview and folder view - with
the small options along the left side of the window.)
Clicking the devices icon (tri-color RGB)
gave me a tree-view of the partitions (hdaxx, hdaxx, etc.)
Selecting the one I knew to be the Suse partition
opened the Suse partition in the right-hand window,
but once I'd done that things went bad and I began to
get messages that this or that was "not found".
I tried the same thing 2 or 3 times and still got
the same results.
> In this process, you reach the Suse install partition. How do you know?
Because I know where I installed it and was able
to confirm by finding a few files with "suse" in
the name, within that folder.
> Even with respect to the ensuing problems, it would be helpfull for
> us to know not only "Mandrake is disoriented", but exactly what happens.
> "Be unable to find files" is of course a lot better, but it does not
> help much yet, because it sounds almost like a magician trick. I'm
> stupefied. Would you please tell us exactly what you did, and what
> resulted? In what way did you have Mandrake "find files", and in what
> way do you determine that it "fails to find it", and how exactly do
> you know the file is there and should have been found?
>
I can't tell you much more than I described above.
I don't remember the names of things not found. It
was just that after I opened the suse partition view
in the "file explorer" window, nothing else worked.
I got the "not found" message when trying to open
a new window from a Desktop shortcut. Since shortcuts
no longer functioned I decided to log out. That's when I
got the logout window full of squares, instead of text.
And logging out dumped me into what I gather was
run level 3. At that point, trying telinit 5 did nothing.
Trying telinit 6 rebooted.
> I means, just imagine that you are now the magician who has just sawed
> a lady in two in front of our eyes, and put her back together. With
> the difference that you are saying it's real, and I believe you mean
> it. Can you understand that the public want to find out how it is
> possible? First we need to understand what exactly are we in need of
> explaining. We start with some somewhat helpless or even impertinent
> questions, like "what is the saw made of".
>
I had no idea that I was so talented. :) I don't mean
to waste people's time here. It just seemed to me
to be an aberration to be aware of. I don't have enough
experience with Linux to know what *really* happened.
I'm just theorizing that Mandrake was disoriented by
opening a second partition with a / mount....but not the
same / mount. (There were no problems with Mandrake
until I opened the Suse partition window.)
> You wrote that Mandrake had put the new partitions in the /etc/fstab
> file. Would you mind posting the contents of the file, and point out
> which lines are the original, and which are the added ones? I would
> like to know what mount options are in the added lines, what mount
> point is used, and how is the device specified. Come on, give us
> something to go on! And no, don't use the drop counter to supply the
> information.
>
I'm afraid that I've since deleted Mandrake and
installed Suse, so I don't have that file. But I pretty
much remember it. I didn't add any lines. Mandrake
wrote something like:
/dev/hda13 /
After that I think it had "noauto" and maybe a bit more.
But there was no file system entry before the "/" and
not much after. (hda13 was the suse partition, while
Mandrake was on hda12.)
This all started because I was having a lot of trouble
getting Suse to boot through my multi-boot, Windows-
based, boot loader, even though Mandrake was working
fine with it. The odd behavior in Mandrake was an
accidental discovery, resulting from trying to figure out
the boot problem.
As it turned out, I don't think that was actually
causing a conflict, except in the situation I detailed
above. The problem seems, rather, to be with Suse's
boot loader install. When Mandrake installed it took
over the MBR without asking. I then re-installed my
boot loader and all was fine. With Suse, both Lilo
and Grub seemed to be temperamental about
installing, and neither of them worked when I assigned
their install to the Linux partition. If I install Lilo to
the MBR it works, but then it fails when I re-install my
boot loader. (BootIt NG - it booted Mandrake but
doesn't see a bootable volume in Suse.) There seems
to be a difference in the way that Mandrake and Suse
install Lilo.
Sorry I can't be more informative, but as you
can see I'm experimenting and fumbling around a
bit here.
.
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