from what I've learned. (im still very new) it would be smart to reinstall mandrake, make sure to format. also check out the mandrake site to see what supported. check it with your system.
 
forget mandrake. i know everyone out there says they are all good. from my experience mandrake is good but slow. i would try SUSE. its the BEST by far. it looks good, works with allot of hardware, it looks beautiful, easy for noobies to learn on, its gorgeous, has alot of options for newbies, looks awesome, and is only 1 cd!!! did i mention that it is the best looking distro ive seen?
 
ive downloaded mandrake 10.0,mandrake 10.1, SUSE 9.1, damn small linux, peanut linux, fedora core 3 TEST, debian 30r2, gentoo, freeBSD, and knopix. thats ALOT i think not many people have that much. the best looking is SUSE the fastest working is SUSE the easyest but expanidble is SUSE. i have it on my 1.8 ghz 512 mb 128 mb radeon 9600se 40gig blahblah, and on my 2.8 ghz 190 ram 64 mb radeon IGP (poopie) and it works faster better blahblahblah BlAh BLAH!! can u believe it!! SUSE kicks. i think gentoo is weak (just cause im mad at it. (read last thread))

thx for your quick reply!
 
my motherboard's brand is basically a "no name" called SystemBoard, I've tried installing FC3 and Mandrake 10.1, no luck on both!
I'm not sure if your suggestion, suse, will work on my motherboard, but anyways, i will definetly give it a shoot!
 
by the way, is suse good to be a web server or mail server? is it stable and fast? or it's only good for client use?

oh well then, suse might not work... I think its the best. SUSE is definitly fast and stable. the most ive seen, acually im happy you brought tat up. in andrake some of my apps would start to hand. with suse. for the day ive been using it. it has had not hangs fails anyhting. as for web server and mail server. im not sure but i would suppose its better then others that are slow? like i said im new and i dont have much use for a server of any type. but its definatly good for client use.

I would also agree that before trying distro after distro, to get the hardware compatibility issues worked out.
 
Rebooting issues with Linux can be related to a variety of hardware issues, funky memory, video card issues and general support for your hardware. Where did you get this board and could you post any links to the company's web page? Is this by chance a VIA EPIA-MVIA or like micro motherboard?
 
Alternately, any chance on telling us what hardware is in the system, such as the video card, hard drive brand and size and other hardware on the system, as well as what OS you have on the system currently?

im just going to chime in on distro switching
 
stick with one when you begin i made the mistake of trying around 30 different ones all non commercial anyhow as stated system specs should help

Hi everyone. I am a mandrake 9.1 newbie, and i wanted to access my past windows partitions from here. I checked on google how to mount automatically partitions. According to this, my etc/fstab file must have some extra lines for the partitions to mount from the begginning. This file is the same as the ones i checked out, but the partitions are nowhere to be found, so i can access them from home or the desktop. How do i make them appear? Thanks for the help.

Mandrake has the habit of mounting window partitions so that root user must be used to view them. Are you using KDE?
 
Do you know where the partitions are on the hard drive?
 
Are they fat16, or fat32 partitions? In other words, what version of Windows did you have on the system. I assume that when you did the Mandrake install, you did not allow Mandrake to over-write the windows partitions to make rom for Mandrake?
 
Is it possible to post your fstab file, so we can look to see if they are already automounted?
 
I have not used Mandrake 9.1 in a while, but I can check my 9.2 install and see how Mnadrake does it specifically.
 
An easy way to see if they are mounted, is to type, in a console window;
 
df (hit the enter key)
 
This will show the auto mounted partitions and where they are mounted.
 
So, if in fstab, you see an entry such as;
 
/dev/hda1 /mnt/dos vfat...........
 
then you know that the vfat partition located on the ist partition of the drive is mounted (on startup) at /mnt/dos.
 
Others may differ in opinion, but I just do the following;
 
1. Go to a console
 
2. type in su (hit the enter key)
 
3. type in the root password (hit the enter key)
 
4. type konqueror
 
When the file manager comes up, hit the back button once. This brings you to the main directory.
 
Navigate to where fstab states that the vfat partition is ie: /mnt/dos
 
Then you should see you vfat files on that partition.
 
You can then make a desktop icon to show the mount point for the partition, or to bring up Konqueror as root user. More on that later.
 
Some newer distros will do this automatically for you, like Mepis or Suse, so that you have a link to the partitions that are auto mounted.
 
 

Hmmm.... Since you get to the boot-loader OK and can select Linux, then it sounds like the install at least went most of the way through. I've had problems (especially with deMudi) where it would think it was finished installing before it was and it would install a boot-loader and reboot without finishing the install (still don't know why). Resinstalling fixed the problem. Also -I have never used mandrake, but when you select Linux in the boot loader, does it come up with a splash screen - or does it scroll some text? If it scrolls text - can you tell us the last thing it displays before rebooting? If there is a splash screen - there is usually a key that you can press that will kill the splash screen and bring up the text loading screen. For me this has been both escape and F2. Anyhoo - telling the last thing the computer outputs could help us figure out what the problem is and how to fix it.
 
I'm a newbi too - hang in there - its worth it.
 

I am running KDE, thats right. I can get to /etc/fstab and see it through a cat command, but how can i copy it to paste it here?
 
Anyway, the last 2 lines are like follows:
 
/dev/hdc5 /mnt/win_d ntfs .....
/dev/hdc6 /mnt/win_e ntfs .....
 
According to this, ther are already mounted, but i cant find them anywhere to view their contents. Does this help?