hi alan,
some confusion obviously, mandrake boots fine off a floppy boot disk,
i've also installed lilo to the mbr of the scsi drive and trying to boot
this way is what is not working-ouch bad syntax!
the numbering(lettering?) of partitions was given by the mandrake
graphical installer and is carried over when i look at mount points
using linuxconf.
your suggestion that i deleted a partition on my ide drive is correct, i
used to have a win95 setup while i played with win98, when i had to move
over to win98 permanently(which at the time was on the second partition)
i deleted the first win95 partition and used partitionmagic in win98 to
move the win98 partition to the beginning on the drive.
what confuses me is that i did not have linux installed at the time and
when installing mandrake i formatted the appropriate partitions before
running the installation, is it the case that the boot sector of a
partition has info concerning it's number?-a sort of hidden label?- that
is carried with it even if it is moved?
if so then this would explain what is happening, but i am surprised that
all the descriptions of how linux descibes partions that i have read
over the years have never refered to this possibility,
every newbie installation guide that i have read seems to be quite
catagorical about how to identify partitions to mount,
if i didn't have just sufficient knowledge to spot this oddity i could
have made a drastic error during installing linux.
one wonders if other linux newbies who are nevertheless confident in
other aspects of their system have been caught out this way, having
played with partitions for one reason or another and then decided to
install linux.
i will do as you suggest but it will take time as i have to continually
shift between booting win98 and linux as my modem doesn't seem to like
linux even though it isn't a softmodem- a whole other topic that i'm
leaving alone for the time being!
thanks for getiing back to me
bascule
Alan Shoemaker wrote:
>
> bascule....if, as you said in your previous message, mandrake
> won't boot, then how is mandrake giving you partition info?
>
> If you can get mandrake running then please post the output of
> fdisk /dev/hda using the p command and fdisk /dev/sda using the
> p command. Also post the contents of your /etc/lilo.conf.
>
> If you deleted a partition on the ide drive and was hda1 then
> hda2 is now the first partition on the drive and I'd guess that
> you've probably moved it into the space vacated by sda1 when you
> deleted it. This doesn't change what linux calls it.
>
> Alan
>
>
