Hard drive geometry problems.
Posts: 11
Hi Folks,
I had a few problems installing 3.4-1rc1. I described the solution to one of them in the "What happened to Grub install to root selection" thread. I use Partition Magic and Boot Magic on that that box.
I got every thing to work. Hoever, Partition Magic reported that it found geometry errors on my HD. Partition Magic was able to fix the errors. Afterwards Mepis booted a little more quickly.
I hope this can be fixed before the final release. Newbies are like to find HD geometry problems to be rather intimidating.Without some kind of diagnostic tools, these kinds of problems can be hard to identify and fix.( for us ordinary folks )
When I installed Mepis on my HP box, it already had; XP,OPENBSD, and Islack on the hard drive.
Peace,
John
New User?
Posts: 11
Hi,
I've been using Mepis and various nixes for aabout 2.5 years. I suppose that gets me past the newbee stage. I'm just a little concerned about new users.
I've never had geometry problems with earlier versions of Mepis. That is one of the reasons I keep using it. Mepis was installed on partitions created with PM. That has never caused problems before.
The number of distros that have bugs in their installers has increasing during the past year. I had a lot fewer problems installing linux when I was a newbee. Generally the developers tend to blame the other operating systems, the user, or the kernel developers.
PM and earlier versions of Mepis work well together. There is something different about this one. I suggest that anyone that has problems with booting 3.4-1 with systems use the utilities in Knoppix or R.I.P. to look at thier partition tables.
Peace,
John
new User?
Posts: 4864
if you use multiple different partitioning tools, and an old drive, your chance of having geometry errors multiplies.
XP, OpenBSD and ISlack already doesn't sound like a newbie to me.
Jon has noted that Partition Magic and Linux doesn't play fair, this may be related to your errors.