Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

[dibl]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

I see reference to /dev/sdc. Are there just the 3 hard drives? All SATA, or is there an IDE/PATA drive in the mix? What is your motherboard and BIOS?

Can you boot a live CD, and run in a Konsole window:

sudo fdisk -lu

and

sudo blkid

and post those outputs here?

[aiiee]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

the more I think about this the more I cant beleve it!!

SO after a nap....(I'v ben up over 36 howers now and trowling stucko on wall's all day today) I am gowing to dust off an old test box and see what I can see........it will go like this.

1- remove the slackware thats on it and use Gparted to make a NTFS partition on the first drive and an ext3 on the second

2- install a old copey of windows XP to the first drive.

3- install some linux to the second drive and install grub to the MBR of drive 1

This wont wipe the windows partition? I need to retain the existing windows partition/info

4. try to install Karmic to the second drive and use the on cd partitioner to do the work and install it's grub2 to the MBR of drive 1

IF that wont work use the Gparted to wipe the second drive and try agin (the original grub would still be in the MBR of drive 1

@aiiee will this reproduse your situation as closley as I can get it??

if so good if not tell me what I'm missing?

OK now for that LONG awated nap

VINNY

Hang on Vinnywright, let me run the two utilities dbil recommended. I appreciate your help.

[aiiee]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

It seems like you are blaming Kubuntu because it is not happy with the Grub left over from Mandriva.

I see you were lucky and it worked in the past, but is Canonical responsible making that work with 9.10? I think if you install Grub 2 in the MBR, and it doesn't boot Kubuntu, then you will have a legitimate complaint. But I don't see where you have done that.

Hey, don't worry about it. You can't help. That's OK. I'm not in a mood to argue ok?

[aiiee]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

I see reference to /dev/sdc. Are there just the 3 hard drives? All SATA, or is there an IDE/PATA drive in the mix? What is your motherboard and BIOS?

Can you boot a live CD, and run in a Konsole window:

sudo fdisk -lu

and

sudo blkid

and post those outputs here?

yes, thank you. Don't mean to sound short but this shouldn't be this difficult and I don't want to lose the windows partition if I can help it. It's backed up, but there are installed things that would be difficult to replicate. Let me try your suggestions, thank you.

[aiiee]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

sudo fdisk -lu

Disk identifier: 0x2f51117c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 63 490223474 245111706 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 41.0 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders, total 80043264 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x402b402a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 63 80019764 40009851 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Disk /dev/sdc: 41.0 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders, total 80043264 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf558ade1

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 63 79521749 39760843+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdc3 79521750 80035829 257040 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc5 126 79521749 39760812 83 Linux


sudo blkid

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo blkid
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/sda1: UUID="22A83F5DA83F2EA3" LABEL="DISK8_VOL1" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="DISK1PART00" UUID="43EA-4442" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdc3: TYPE="swap"
/dev/sdc5: UUID="ae0c2464-ea50-4fbe-b2b7-397ec97d28e5" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

two drives, fat32 disk which is primary disk that machine boots from, all partitions are on this disk except for one 233gb ntfs partition which is a usb external drive. This is an old win2k macchine. .

the ext3 partition used to be my mandriva install, I had two ext2 partitions which I re-formatted as the one ext3 partition you see now, and which, off and on, contains what there is of my 9.10 install. I still am getting the mandriva boot splash( lilo or grub I don't know ) offering to boot me into either windows, linux or linux-nonfb (?), or failsafe. the linux choices don't work at this point because the mandriva installs behind them have been wiped to make the above mentioned ext3 partition.

[dibl]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

It says all of /dev/sda is NTFS format. That's OK -- shouldn't matter.

Your partitioning of /dev/sdc is odd, though. Did you deliberately make the one and only Linux partition an extended type? Or did the Kubuntu installer do that for you? Each hard drive can have up to 4 primary partitions -- you only need extended partitions if you are going to exceed 4 partitions in total. This may be relevant to the Grub problems, but I'm not sure about that.

My personal preference is to use a separate GParted or Parted Magic Live CD to do my hard drive partitioning, and limit the *buntu installer to installing. The Parted Magic Live CD has some other cool utilities on it, like a SMART GUI to test hard drives and some CPU benchmarks. Download a zipped ISO from here:

http://partedmagic.com/download.html

or get the good old GParted Live CD ISO from here:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

Burn the ISO to a blank CD at slow speed.

If you will use one of those, and change the /dev/sdc partitioning to 3 primary partitions, I think we can make some progress (tomorrow ... -- it's quitting time here). Make three partitions thusly:

12GB ext4 (we'll put Kubuntu here)
1GB (swap)
all the rest of it ext4 (we'll make it /home)


ALSO, I still need an answer to my question about the hard drive interface -- SATA, PATA, or mixed?

[aiiee]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

ok, its 10pm here, I'll make the partitions you suggest.

One thing that surprised me is that the ntfs partition is sda1. that is not my primary drive, that is a usb drive, not bootable. My bootable primary drive is sdb1 I think. My 'c' drive is the only fat32 drive on my system, so that has to be it right?

No, I did not make sdc an extended partition. I only used the manual partitioning utility of the 9.10 install disk. There is no dialog whether or not to make an extended partition, although perhaps that could have been an artifact of re-formatting the old mandriva partition?

In any event I will make the partitions you suggest and note here when that is done.

[dibl]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

One thing that surprised me is that the ntfs partition is sda1. that is not my primary drive, that is a usb drive, not bootable. My bootable primary drive is sdb1 I think. My 'c' drive is the only fat32 drive on my system, so that has to be it right?

This is part of the cause of the Grub problems. You don't want extraneous drives plugged in when you're installing -- they can cause huge confusion as the Linux installer "reads" the hardware.

I only used the manual partitioning utility of the 9.10 install disk. There is no dialog whether or not to make an extended partition

Yep. That's why I do partitioning first, with a Parted Magic Live CD, before I ever touch the Linux installation CD.

If you will make the 3 primary partitions as I suggested, then I'm confident that, after reviewing your BIOS settings and understanding the hard drive interfaces, Kubuntu can be installed and convinced to boot itself and Win2k.

Tomorrow .....

[aiiee]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

One thing that surprised me is that the ntfs partition is sda1. that is not my primary drive, that is a usb drive, not bootable. My bootable primary drive is sdb1 I think. My 'c' drive is the only fat32 drive on my system, so that has to be it right?

This is part of the cause of the Grub problems. You don't want extraneous drives plugged in when you're installing -- they can cause huge confusion as the Linux installer "reads" the hardware.

I only used the manual partitioning utility of the 9.10 install disk. There is no dialog whether or not to make an extended partition

Yep. That's why I do partitioning first, with a Parted Magic Live CD, before I ever touch the Linux installation CD.

If you will make the 3 primary partitions as I suggested, then I'm confident that, after reviewing your BIOS settings and understanding the hard drive interfaces, Kubuntu can be installed and convinced to boot itself and Win2k.

Tomorrow .....

the more you know

thanks dibl, partitions are done, so far so good. we'll discuss what to do further tomorrow then.

[aiiee]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

Ok, first discovery: I have 2 internal hds, both old style with wide ribbon cable (PATA?)
hda1 = 38.16 G fat32
sda1=233.76G ntfs

No USB drives were ever attached (pays to verify assumptions yes?)

I also have linux partitions as requested:
hdb1=12.29G ext3
hdb2=1.24G swap
hdb3=24.64G ext3
Running chkdsk on Windows partitions now to make sure they are clean before proceeding

sudo fdisk -lu:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/sda: 251.0 GB, 251000193024 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30515 cylinders, total 490234752 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2f51117c

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 63 490223474 245111706 7 HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 41.0 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders, total 80043264 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x402b402a

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 63 80019764 40009851 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Disk /dev/sdc: 41.0 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders, total 80043264 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf558ade1

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 63 25768259 12884098+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 25768260 28370789 1301265 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc3 28370790 80035829 25832520 83 Linux
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

sudo blkid:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo blkid
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/sda1: UUID="22A83F5DA83F2EA3" LABEL="DISK8_VOL1" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="DISK1PART00" UUID="43EA-4442" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sdc1: UUID="72bd7310-30f9-41a9-beb8-b00ffa6aead2" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sdc2: UUID="6e101d97-d40c-4394-b3e4-f63e401f3676" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sdc3: UUID="6032dc7f-aaf5-4fd1-ba59-96da24e7725a" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

[dibl]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

Hmmm. fdisk says you have 3 hard drives, not 2. So, if there are two internal IDE/PATA drives, what is the third? Also, why /dev/loop0 -- what is the loop device, with a sqashfs filesystem on it?

[aiiee]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

Hmmm. fdisk says you have 3 hard drives, not 2. So, if there are two internal IDE/PATA drives, what is the third? Also, why /dev/loop0 -- what is the loop device, with a sqashfs filesystem on it?

That /dev/loop0 is part of the live CD I think, it doesn't show up in gparted. there is hda and sda, what is the third drive? the partitions are logical not physcial right?

[dibl]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

You are undoubtedly right about the loop device -- I'd forgotten that you are running from the Live CD.

Partitions are logical, but drive devices are physical. So, where you see "dev/sda", "dev/sdb" and "dev/sdc" in the fdisk output, that says there are three physical drives.

You don't have a thumb drive or something like that plugged in, do you? If so, open Dolphin, right-click it and "safely remove" it.

[aiiee]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

You are undoubtedly right about the loop device -- I'd forgotten that you are running from the Live CD.

Partitions are logical, but drive devices are physical. So, where you see "dev/sda", "dev/sdb" and "dev/sdc" in the fdisk output, that says there are three physical drives.

You don't have a thumb drive or something like that plugged in, do you? If so, open Dolphin, right-click it and "safely remove" it.

Ah, now I understand. Yes, I have 3 hard drives, sorry. I have 1 38.16G drives formatted as fat32,
1 38.16G drive with the linux partitions, and 1 233.76G drive formatted as ntfs.

Is that the problem?

[dibl]

Re: Installing Kubuntu 9.10 over old Mandriva distro

Is that the problem?

It's not a problem, but it has to be understood -- it could be an issue getting Grub to install as desired. OK, you told me you have two IDE drives, but what is the interface to the third drive? Is it the big USB drive? If so, can you unplug it safely?