I am in the process of wiping a Mandriva 2006 box and replacing it with KnoppMyth. I can get the installer (R5) to create the partitions and install the software on the 300gb hard drive. When I reboot, the old bootloader appears from Mandriva asking which kernel to boot. Then it hangs because all that stuff has been deleted.

My question: Where in the KnoppMyth installer should I be looking to ensure that it is deleting a previous bootloader with its own? I do not know if it is lilo or grub and I don't know if it's written to the MBR or not.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

di11rod

Hardware:

Abit BP6 mobo with dual Celeron 400
512 mb ram
300gb 7600rpm Seagate IDE hard drive
Riva TNT Nvidia video card (forgot the memory size)
Hauppage PVR 150

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This was a manual install, wasn't it? I believe that auto-install will just completely clear out the partition table and take over the disk and should not leave anything like that "hanging around".

Thanks for the pointer about auto-install. I had tried an auto-install, but I kept encountering an error message during the format process where it gave an error message along the lines of:

mkfs.ext3: No such device or address while trying to determine filesystem size.... mke2fs 1.40 WIP (14 NOV 2006).

By doing manual, I was able to delete all the partitions and then create a single, 300gb bootable partition that I wrote to the partition table.

Per your suggestion, I've now gone back to the auto install and it came back with that same error message.

If you've got an idea on how to address that problem, I'm happy to try it!

BTW- I'm using a USB keyboard, which I didn't mention in the hardware description earlier. PS2 mouse, however.

Appreciatively,

di11rod

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Ok, then I suggest that you boot the CD in preparation for doing another manual install. But before you start the install, you switch to console 2 with <ALT-F2> and run the following command
(NOTE: This will overwrite the disk & you WILL lose anything on the disk) :

Then switch back to console 1 with <ALT-F1> and do a normal manual install.

Using the syntax you supplied, I received an error message saying the volume was mounted read-only. I substituted other volume references such as /dev/hdc1 and /dev/hdc2, and the command ran properly, but when I installed and then rebooted, still, Mandrake bootloader took control.

I have multiple linux diagnostic boot disks available with gparted and other utilities available. If someone could tell me a sure-fire way to absolutely destroy the data in the MBR, I would greatly appreciate it.

thanks in advance,

di11rod

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Still struggling with this issue. Any help greatly appreciated.

I've tried gparted to reformat the HD. I've tried Partition Magic to reformat the HD. I've tried the dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc1 bs=512 count=8

I've tried running grub-install -e1 /dev/hdc1.

Still can't destroy the MBR. Any ideas on how to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

di11rod

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http://www.austinskatenotes.org

Still burning hours on this futile effort. Installed another hard drive as the ONLY hard drive in the computer. Went through the whole process (manual install) via the MythKnoppix disc, only to find that this hard drive also had a bootloader installed from a previous linux installation.

Back to the same problem.

di11rod

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Hi,

If you can put the fingers on an old dos bootable floppy that has fdisk on it you can clear the master boot record with fdisk /mbr That will turn the drive back into a bootable device.

Be sure your cables are setup properly (ide0 or 1, which ever is lowest) and drive is jumpered for master. I did have a simular issue with a 120 gig drive and simply replacing the cable with an 80 conductor one cured the issue for me.

There is also a live cd of GParted http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php , very good tool for setting up partitions for those "stubborn" drives. I don't usually leave home with out it

If you finally get a hda1 partition of ~5gig for root, then an auto upgrade should install properly and work. You can then manually mkswap (~384meg) and any additional partitions for the various recordings. The "pamphlet" has details.

Be sure also to have it install the boot loader into the mbr and turn off any anti virus boot sector protection in cmos, at least till the install / upgrade is finished.

There are a lot of little differences in hardware, so sometimes it just takes a little extra experimenting to get things in line.

The Riva TNT Nvidia video card may require you to enter tv at boot time unless it can handle 1280x1024 res. boot: tv gives 800x600.

Mike

MJL-

thanks a LOT for the tip about the cables. I'm still working this from a software angle using some advice provided by a few friends of mine, but I have your tip on my 'to-try-list'. No old DOS disk available, but is now down there further on the 'to-try-list'.

Appreciatively,

di11rod

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http://www.austinskatenotes.org

*shakes head*

Ok, this is not that hard. Auto install will WIPE the whole freakin disk boot loader and all, no ifs ands or buts about it. (I've done it fifty blue million times) Dale is 100% correct.

My guess is that you may have a bad CD burn, try (humor me) reburning your CD at 1x and do an autoinstall see what happens. And please use R5E50 and check the Md5sum to make sure your downloaded copy checks out and do the cd check at the beginning of the install to make sure the media is ok. Theres a long history of wierdness with bad burns. Do a little searching if you want to check me out on this and you'll understand my paranoia.

I can't begin to imagine why Autoinstall would refuse to install on 2 different hard drives.

Make sure your hard drive is the only hard drive in the system at the time of the install and is the master drive (and the only drive) on the first SATA/IDE Channel.

The Ether..

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Knoppmyth 7.02 Kernel 2.6.39-LINHES
[MBE] SilverStone LC-10 HTPC Case, Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD X2 4200+, 1G RAM, Nvidia 9500 PCIe, PVR500 and a HD-PVR - Rockin VDPAU

"Boot sector virus protection" in the BIOS is one possibility... There are probably a a couple other reasons it'd think his HD was unwritable (maybe CD on /dev/hda, and HD on /dev/hdc), but that'd be my first guess.

OBTW - I usually tell pepole to redownload from a different mirror too.

Didn't think of the boot sector protection.. nice one TJC..

_________________
Knoppmyth 7.02 Kernel 2.6.39-LINHES
[MBE] SilverStone LC-10 HTPC Case, Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD X2 4200+, 1G RAM, Nvidia 9500 PCIe, PVR500 and a HD-PVR - Rockin VDPAU

It was a borked cabling / jumper setting problem. Per MLJ's suggestion, I re-cabled the CD drive and the hard drive, adding a missing jumper to the 6gb Maxtor I was testing with. This enabled the auto-install to progress past the point it would error out with the above-mentioned error message.

Lesson learned.

Also, it looks like maybe the 'manual install' fails silently in writing lilo to the MBR. Everytime I would re-install using the manual option, it would get to the end and say it had installed, but nothing was written to the MBR.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to consider my situation and give me pointers. I'll try to do the same for others with my improving MYTH experience.

Appreciatively,

di11rod

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http://www.austinskatenotes.org

Hi,

Good to see you are on a roll
The manual install includes manually installing the lilo.conf after you make any special changes. It is not a silent failure.

Mike

The dialog for the manual install reports that it will be installed on the device, so it's not clear that you will have to run lilo.
If the lilo.conf in /mnt/hdinstall/etc/ is the one that will be used, the boot entry was pointing to the wrong drive, even though root was pointing to the correct partition. I had to modify that entry to point to the boot device and run lilo with the -b parameter.
BTW the set up described above was not for the unit below:

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Updated 2019/10/26: AthlonII X2 265 Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P
16Gb PC 1866 DDR3, 500GB+2TB+4TB SATA HDD,
SATA DVD-RW Asus DRW-24D5MT , NVIDIA GeForce GT1080
Hauppauage Nova-T 500, Nova-T LinHes R8.6.1