Upgrading Mandrake 7.0 to 8.1 Please help

[jamiedodd]

Trying to Upgrade mandrake from 7.0 to 8.1 has proven almost impossible. I get to the installation screen of 8.1 select my language, accept the agreement and I get an error message that a kernel is missing to the extent of BOOT10. It won't go any further than that. So in the process of trying to get 8.1 loaded, I fdisked the system in DOS. I am unable to do this. Getting the error Can not delete primary DOS partition when extened DOS partition exists. I go to delete the extended DOS partition and there is not one there. I can't go any further on the fdisk. So I tried to reformat the C drive. It won't do that either. The machine only has Linux on it. I removed the windows program when I installed Linux. Any feedback as to what I can do with this machine would be helpful. I do not have internet access on that machine. The 7.0 version I have won't run netscape. (The main reason for the upgrade) By the way, I am a very new user to Linux, so I will need baby steps on how to do things.

Thanks

 

[Squadcar7]

Well Jamie,
The only time I ever get to see the install of Mandrake 8.1 is when I put it on my own computer, and I have this knack for being able to undo the changes I make that end up screwing up my Linux build very easily, so I think I've only installed it three times (but the first one is always experimental).
However, I do Windows installs at least 12 times a day, building computers at work, so I have an idea with what's going on. First of all, any of you who reads this post, Microsoft has built their crappy little fdisk program for FAT32 only, and WILL NOT RECOGNIZE ANY OTHER filesystems. Maybe NTFS, but that's also completely useless. However, the problems you're describing sound like they are not necessarily software problems at all, but problems with your hardware. First suspect sounds like your hard drive or motherboard. After that, RAM, cdrom, and processor. if that doesn't fix it, then maybe it is a software problem. However, you probably don't have the luxury of troubleshooting parts like I do, so don't go out and buy a whole new computer just for troubleshooting.

 

[jamiedodd]

Since it looks as though it will be almost impossible to run fdisk from microsoft, do you know the steps in running fdisk in linux? I really don't see how it could be a hardware issue, the computer is brand new. I took it out of the box and installed 7.0 over my windows xp. I know that there is a way to fdisk linux from root. The only problem is that I don't know anything about how it should work. I am going to post a new message as to that, if you have any idea how else to help I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

 

[jrjuiliano]

If you want to wipe the entire hard drive and start over, there are a couple things to try:

Using FDISK /FIXMBR to clear out the Master Boot Record. Only works in FAT environments. If you have Windows 2000 there is a tool you can get off the cd that works much the same as FDISK.

Do a search on Goolgle for "AEFDISK". This is a cool little program that will wipe any partition regardless of what type it is. The shareware version will let you only wipe everything, instead of specific partitions, but it's good enough for that and will fit on a regular Win 98 Startup Disk.

You can also try to get into the recovery mode or console line for Mandrake and run &quot;fdisk /dev/<devicename>&quot;, &quot;p&quot; to print out the partition table and &quot;d&quot; to delete the partitions.

Hope that helps.

J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group