Last night I downloaded the Mandrake 9.2 ISO's from a mirror site and tried to install it.

I ran the install as an upgrade to one of two 9.1 installations. At the point where LILO updates my MBR, my computer froze. I rebooted to my hard drive and LILO seemed to run OK. However, it couldn't load 9.2. I tried rebooting my other 9.1 configuration, but it wouldn't load it either.

I was in a hurry to get my workstation back up and running last night, so I tried re-installing 9.1. Installation went smooth until the same point ... computer just froze. I rebooted to the hard drive, and LILO seemed to run OK again. I tried booting into the new 9.1 installation and was forced to run fsck ... it failed, but after rebooting again, the new installation ran fine. I modified the lilo.conf file to add an entry for my existing 9.1 installation, and was able to boot that one up as well.

My question is, has anyone experienced this problem that found a cure for it?

I will try sorting things out later tonight, but I figure it wouldn't hurt to ask if someone has already BTDT.

My second installation of 9.1 is on a flaky hard drive that needs to be replaced, so I'd really like to get a stable OS on the other hard drive and move my data over. I really love Mandrake 9.1. I had very few problems with it, but figured I'd wait for 9.2 instead. Now I'm not so sure, especially with all the problems I've been reading about. Good thing I hadn't tossed those 9.1 CD's yet.

Also, are there updated 9.2 ISO's that have been released which address some of the issues discussed in this forum?

"My question is, has anyone experienced this problem that found a cure for it?"

I ran for a while with a flakey IDE controller which caused me to crash fairly often. Before I finally threw the IDE controller away I created a rescue system which greatly speeds up the process of recovering from disk crashes.

http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html
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Steve Stites

Thanks for the link, Steve. Lifeboat looks like an awesome tool. Can you run mondo when you boot up with a Lifeboat CD?

I have been using Knoppix and Gentoo CD's to boot up and repair stuff. I'm not too thrilled with Knoppix's performance, though. It seems to be kinda sluggish, especially on my laptop.

The data on my 'flakey' hard drive is pretty safe. What happens is the hard drive goes into 'sleep' mode, and doesn't want to 'wake' up again. The system just freezes while waiting for it to come back online. Normally, I just reboot and linux recognizes that I've shut down uncleanly. I say 'no' to the integrity check, and it fires right up again.

I'm considering just going with Gentoo instead of Mandrake. It will take a little bit longer to get up and running at full speed again, but its performance and flexibility are really enticing.

Ed M.

"Can you run mondo when you boot up with a Lifeboat CD?"

I don't know for sure, I never tried. When I first started looking at rescue CD's the one that I liked best was Mindi. But Mindi was set up as a service routine for Mondo and I thought I would like to change Mindi to a generalized rescue CD that also supports Mondo. When I approached the Mindi/Mondo developer with my idea he flamed me on about the third email. So I ended up writing LifeBoat from scratch.

I don't remember what specialized requirements Mondo places on a rescue CD, if any. It is possible that the stock Mandrake version of LifeBoat will support Mondo as is. If not then I don't think that it would be too hard to add Mondo support using the LifeBoat Addons feature. If you have a working Mondo backup system then you could experiment until you got Mondo restores working using LifeBoat. If you get a Mondo support feature working on LifeBoat then I would be very interested in adding it to the LifeBoat package and distributing it.


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Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites