so, here's my new addition to my now famous (or rather infamous?) linux problems and questions serie. my friend decided to try mandrake linux 10.1 community, the same i'm using right now. I copied him all the 3 cds without any problems, and i gave him with a little magazine to let him install it by himself. the installation went smootly all the way 'till the end, but after he restarted is pc to finally boot windows and starts a GUI session under KDE, problems started. He couldn't pass the mounting of his '' racine'' partiton. (heh, don't know how it's named in english, the translation is root, but i doubt it aplies here, since root is also a name for an usr (in the french version too)) he went trough the ''rescue'' process, but got a bunch of errors. He can't get is motherboard to work, nor his graphic card, his sound card and his internet card. I think the last two ones are on the motherboard, and aren't pci extensions. Here's the intersting part, everything's made from NVIDIA, his motherboard is from the NForce serie, and his graphic card is a GForce 5200 oc (if i remember well.) Now all i wonder is how the hell can i download them form the internet if his internet card doesn't work, and if i can't even start linux? and what's the point with the non-mounting partition? help would be really apreciated form both my friend and myself. cahz.
I've no idea about the problems, but I'm trying to convert my workplace to use Linux in the neae future - probably Fedora Core 4. The staff are not overly experienced with Windows anyway so it's not like they will miss anything by moving to Linux - heck some people don't know how to save to a floppy or log onto the domain, but oh well hehe. The main reason I'm interested in the move though is when we get new computers in 6 months time, we could easily shave £25,000 off our bill by not buying XP + Office and using the open source alternative; because the place is a charity without much moolah the money saved will make a big impact, possibly to be used to improve other services. The CEO used to work in telecommunications in the 70's and 80's on good 'ole original Unix so he can see the benefits, but he is not so convinced everyone will be happy with the move
Ya did the same thing at my last place of work, Legit. Didnt take much convincing once the owner saw the money saved, the staff could have cared less as well.
The point with the non-mounting partition is that Linux can't mount your harddisk *at all*. The reason it boots initially is that the first loading is done by the BIOS, after that, Linux in RAM takes over and tries to load the rest... but if it can't, it signals a failure to mount the root partition. This probably means the partitioning went wrong, the kernel has been compiled wrongly, or the kernel does not have the drivers to mount the filesystem. All of them seem unlikely though :-(
i'm pretty sure i can't be, but i'll post my question anyway: can a type of partion (fat32, ntsf,...) be ''uncompatible'' in a way if some conditions are combined? and can linux recognize nvidia stuff without any change? i'm pretty sure i've heard somewhere that nvidia and ATI drivers couldn't be implanted in linux distributions that are free, or something like that. and what could i check or try to finally make linux start? can something be done, or it is impossible and inevitable? ...the sound of inevitability.
OK, SATA and PATA are ways of connecting hard disks to motherboards. PATA is a cable using 40 pins, and is long and wide, looking like this: SATA is a thinner cable, looking like this: If possible open up or get him to open up his computer and see which it is.
