Soon I will be installing the latest version of Mandrake. Currently i'm dual-booting with 98/W2K. I plan on installing Mandrake on a 3rd empty hard drive that is hooked upto a PCI IDE controller card.
1) How can i specify that Mandrake be installed on this 3rd hdd?
I thought i might need the linux drivers for this IDE controller card, but the CD that came w/ this card has no linux drivers for it. I do however, have the DOS driver for it on a floppy diskette.
2) How can i get a tri-boot system boot menu upon boot up?
3) Unlike FAT/FAT32, i hear that the cluster size is a NON-issue under Mandrake. So i take it i do not need to make any partitions - correct?
You might not be able to install Mandrake to a drive attached to that controller. Check the Mandrake hardware compatibility lists. (or just boot with the mandrake CD and see if the drive on the controller is available as a destination... exit out if not)
As for partitions, create partitions during Linux setup with DiskDrake (or let it auto-allocate). Go through the installation Demos at mandrake's web site.
The boot loader will install to the master boot record of your boot drive... and you will have a Linux choice and a Windows choice (may say DOS) to boot from. This will take you to the Windows 2000 bootloader (nldr menu) where you can choose Win2K or Windows 98.
Ran through the installation process and only displayed the 40 gig Win98 drive. As a work around, i thought what i could do is hook up the empty 10 gig as the master on IDE 1. Boot up w/ the Linux boot diskette. And then proceed w/ install as if it were the only OS in this machine. After i am done installing mandrake, then i could go back to my original configuration. However, that means i'll need some type of a boot loader that will recognize all the 3 OS and give the choice to boot up accordingly. Do you think this will work? Is there a special tool out there that will let me add the boot menu after the fact? If i'm not mistaken, maybe i could get LILO to somehow give me the multiboot option w/ this method.
Hell i dunno... i'm just shootin ideas off the top of my head as a work around this situation.
LILO is likely to be unable to bootstrap that device. For LILO to work, a device must be accessible by the bios. If the Mandrake installer doesn't probe for, and identify that controller card you're pretty much screwed. Bootable SCSI cards, have a "scsi bios" (firmware that has instructions for low level access at boot time). It's possible to get LILO to boot from an ATA controller card, but you need to know the i/o ranges of the device and specify it as a parameter in the lilo.conf file. There still has to be support for it in the kernel though... the parameters are just so the boot loader can find the kernel.
I was thinking that if Mandrake could probe for that card, the Grub boot loader might be able to access the drive but I doubt that's going to be possible. The problem with those controller cards is that they need a driver. Mandrake probably would have set that up, if it could have. Perhaps they quit probing for those, or yours is unsupported. I had thought that Maxtor card (if that's the card you're talking about) might just be a branded Promise controller and that Mandrake might be able to deal with it.
Grogan, you're help is def. appreciated. I tried it earlier (installation) w/ version 8.1 . So tonight i'll d/l the latest version (9.1 i believe) and try it again once i get the ISO image extracted and my install CDs setup. Hopefully the latest version might probe for other HDDs.
And yes, you're right, that maxtor promise ata controller card is what this 10 gigger is hooked upto.
That might work... Mandrake 9.1 would have a newer kernel and your card might be recognized. They might have also ironed out some of the kinks in installing to promise controllers in a newer version of Mandrake also.
All you need to install it into is an unformatted partition of up to 6gb. You can have a 4gb partition if you want, 6gb leaves a bit of "headroom".
I use 9.1 on a 6gb partition, Mandrake automatically creates a small swap, a 4gb root partition and the rest for my home partition.
Use partition magic to set up your partitions, Win95/98/ and me don't take up much disk space so you should have enough.
If you have an extended partition, put linux in there - it will install. 9.1 is very easy to install, it's the easiest of the latest Red Hat & SuSE - I tried them.
#7. "RE: Linux Installation Question" In response to _Chewy_ (Reply # 0) Wed Jul-23-03 08:15 PM by _Chewy_
Sweet - the latest version of Mandrake (v 9.1) recognized all 3 of my hard drives including hte one attached to my PCI IDE controller card!
So before i embark on this mission, a question on device drivers.
Dell System Pent III Intel Pentium 815 chipset. NEC DVD-ROM Lite-On CD-RW drive. Santa Cruz Sound Card 32 MB DDR Nvidia GeForce2 Winmodem External USB cable modem ISP = Comcast. HP Deskjet hooked up via USB
This will be my first time ever installing Linux and really don't know how Linux is going to handle some of the USB devices. Will i need to go to each manufacturers website and look for a Linux driver or will Linux automatically recognize them?
In addition, what about the updates? Of course we all know about the PITA updates M$ suggests you make for either the OS or IE .... I have no idea how Mandrake is on this. Is there such an update website? Or is it unrequired since it is a very secure OS?
You're probably going to have trouble with the USB devices. Not necessarily that they can't be made to work, depending on what they are (cross that bridge when you get that far), but I think it's less likely that they are going to be automatically configured correctly.
As for updates, Mandrake has "Mandrake Update". You'll find it somewhere in your Mandrake Control Center/Panel whatever the doohickey is called these days (I haven't used Mandrake since 7.2). It's what you're expecting... an online update mechanism.
Thanks. Before i start on this, i'm probably going to reformat my windows dual-boot OSs.
On a side note, I really don't like the way W2K is behaving on the NTFS drive. (referring to my new 200 gigger here) but then again, i really don't know what to do cuz if i go with FAT32, i know i'm gonna have a ploethera of 8 GB partitions which isn't bad, but it's not the way i had envisioned using this new hdd. I might go with 16 GB partitions, and sacrifice a bit on the cluster size. After all, it's not like i'm hurting for space on this motherload of a drive.
At any rate, i'm gonna make sure my windows dual-boot is all nice 'n kosher before i start the installation for Mandrake.
#10. "RE: Linux Installation Question" In response to Grogan (Reply # 8)
Hey Grogan i was at Nvidia's website earlier today to d/l my video card drivers. What is the difference between IA32 and IA64? I'm not sure which of these drivers to use for Mandrake.
Mandrake detected my 2 usb printers and configured them correctly, a Brother HL-1250 and a HP959c colour inkjet, and is the only distro to detect the usb Alcatel speedtouch adsl modem, this is in the UK, that modem is a real pain in the a*** to get set up.
Mandrake 9.1 also installs nvidia 3d acceleration drivers, SuSE & RedHat latest versions do not.
