My Linux Woes-1

[Aijaz Akhtar]

As a preamble again, let me tell me you folks that I have 5 systems at my under me - two personal laptops, one system in my own office room, and 3 systems in a FOSS Lab I established (one is only Windows at the moment to configure and export data from Arc GIS, so I have not included that). In all these systems, I have been rather playing with various distros. At office for example, we need to install Grass GIS in at least two systems. All need dual booting.
So here I go:
At office PC-1, (P-IV 2.4, 256 MB) I started with Xandros, but Grass rpms and its libraries were not compatible with trhis debian. So I switched to PCQLinux. Despite my various attempts of editing fstab file, it could never mount CDRom or Win partitions, mor my USB (Pen- as people generally call here) Drives. I changed it to WhiteBox (RedHat clone), and there I could configure fstab, but Grass installation failed. Then I was asked to try RedHat 9 itself as their CDs were available in our Geodata Division (others were my personal collection), but the same problem continued, Grass failed. (It is working fine at my Hyderabad office with Mandrake 10 as well as PCQLinux). (Though I got a trick to issue the command rpm --install --force <RPM name> --nodeps and got it working at my personal laptop with Mandrake). I again reinstalled PCQLinux yesterday. And since yestereday only, I have re-installed PCQ (once with 'Upgrade option) but it is now failing to install the boat loader. Initially I got the message Grub Stage-2., and NOTHING booted - neither Win nor lin. And now, it has just become 'Grub' as the message. I tried rescue mode too, even gace the command chroot mnt/sysimage (what it asked to issue), nothing happened. earlier I have been using my mandrake CDs to recover Windows Loader. But both Mandrake 10 and Mandrake 10.1 have now stopped giving the rescue options - recover Linux boot, recover Windows bot etc) and I am taken to various screens, and then suddenly the message that "CDRom not found"!!. because of this I could not install Mandrake. Nor I have been able to recover Windows boot. And what happened to Windows CD repair option. I am not able to get that too!!!
Other woes later.

[Edited Batty]

 

[banned2wise]

instead of doing so much, u must have gone to *packages.debian.org @ the first place.

Use some deb distro, and get the deb packages
as mentioned above.

I use knoppix, and I have recommended it to ye tooo ....
so use it atleast now. Knoppix is very suitable for troubleshooting.

 

[it_waaznt_me]

Lol .. I edited the thread title to Woes instead of Woves .. Earlier I thought it was some typo of wives.. ...

Well .. now to your problem .. That problem started after PCQLinux na .. ? Didnt XP booted even once after installing PcqLinux ..?
This happened to me too and the Grub getting stuck at Chainloader 1 .. What I did was changing the IDE access setting from BIOS ..
If you are using an IDE disk, try changing the access mode to LBA instead of CHS .. This worked for me ...
Plus .. you could try using OSLoader and see if the Linux partition boots with it ..

 

[GNUrag]

Hello Aijaz,

From your narration, what i feel is that you are trying too many distributions at the same time.

Please take some time and and decide on the distribution you want to use finally. Original unmodified distributions would be the proper choice. If you are willing to install Debian Sarge and have internet connection on your machine then i may provide remote support for you. and login to your machine and do the installation from here.

PS: After reading your woes i tried installing grass myself on my comp. Just issuing # apt-get install grass got grass60 application working on my machine.

 

[ujjwal]

Rescuing GRUB is very simple, you don't even need the rescue disk for your system (it helps though), any bootable linux with support for the filesystem you use and your basic hardware is enough.

You need to know the partition where /boot is mounted (for example /dev/hda1) for your distro. Once you are booted into a working linux system (using any live cd), mount this partition on a directory, say /mnt/system, and then chroot to it (chroot /mnt/system), after that follow the rescue instructions for GRUB in the Linux Tips & Tricks thread

 

[Aijaz Akhtar]

Thanks friends, I will follow some suggestions and let you all know. I am submitting more woes (if permitted that is, soon after this post). And since one distro has failed in accessing even the USB drive or CD, I could not proceed further, and used another distro. This Lab is meant for normal users and not geeks like all of you there. And unless a drive/partition (think in terms of C/D/E of redmond) are immediately accessible, nobody is going to like Linux (Yes, for them any thing is Linux and if in one distro they feel a problem, they would conclude again that Linux is not ready for the desktop as yet!! And that I want to avoid, and use the most user frienly distro where at least the drives need not be mounted every time you want to use.

 

[Aijaz Akhtar]

Quote:
Use some deb distro, and get the deb packages
as mentioned above.

I use knoppix, and I have recommended it to ye tooo ....
so use it atleast now. Knoppix is very suitable for troubleshooting.

I am at dial up and it may be difficult to download .deb for various programs. Knoppix is also cool, but I have only Live CDs, not installable ones.

Quote:
Lol .. I edited the thread title to Woes instead of Woves .. Earlier I thought it was some typo of wives.. ...

Yes, my typo. I typed all the woes simultaneously, wil post some now, and this mistake was on the first only

That problem started after PCQLinux na .. ?.
Yes, but now yesterday I got the Win loader from my laptop recovery CD and repaired the Windows, and deleted the partitions of PCQ. Wil try some other distro.

Quote:
Plus .. you could try using OSLoader and see if the Linux partition boots with it.
No OS loader was available in my CD collection here at Nagpur, I might have left them at Hyderabad fropm where I have come here (and have not changed my profile as I am now trying to get a transfer back to Hyderabad.
Quote:
PS: After reading your woes i tried installing grass myself on my comp. Just issuing # apt-get install grass got grass60 application working on my machine.
After apt-get what? The whole package I have has a mail shell script, a tar ball, and many lib files (rpms). Do I mention the rpms name after apt-get? or the grass tar ball name?
Besides I could succeed too many a time in installing Grass. But the Grass is not properly installed. To check it, there are three steps, all after loading spearfish, the sample data. 1. Load this and when the d.m (Display Manager) starts, add vectors and rasters from the given data – soil, geology, road etc and ask it to display map. If the DM disappears and the console gives some error, Grass is not correctly installed. 2. Go for Display, nviz. If it must show the 3-d map all right if it is properly instaled. And 3. if a query succeeds. Will you please check this in your installations?

Quote:
You need to know the partition where /boot is mounted (for example /dev/hda1) for your distro. Once you are booted into a working linux system (using any live cd), mount this partition on a directory, say /mnt/system, and then chroot to it (chroot /mnt/system), after that follow the rescue instructions for GRUB in the Linux Tips & Tricks thread
I mentioned this. The Live CD suggested to chroot/sysimage/hdX. And I did issue this giving it hda1 in my case, but chroot did not work. It never gave any other instructions to be followed. I did not try mnt/system however.
Tips and Trickes thread I tried too for LILO. It said "Fatal error: rootfs …(some thing, I forgot). I did edit lilo.config too, but it continued saying that there is an error in Lilo.config. The same thing happens with Yoper as well as in another system (laptop) with Vector Linux. Leave aside /sbin/lilo, I did edit lilo.config, but it resulted in the same errors.
/sbin/lilo also does not result in any response. And no man pages have been installed nor available with the distros. I did not check this with PCQ/Mandrake where I installed 'everything'