On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 11:21:07 +0000, American Pi pecked at a keyboard in
panic:

Initramfs would be a feature of Mandrake 10 and the new 2.6.x kernel. When you installed
Mandrake 9.2 did you select the upgrade option when you installed the OS
by any chance? If an existing version of Mandrake is detected by the
installer it defaults to an upgrade. Did you format / (your
root partition)? It should only take about 30 minutes to install so I
suggest you read the documentation carefully, take a deep breath and Don't
Panic! For a first time install I would use the Disk Manager in WinXP to
delete the partitions you created for Mandrake and let the Mandrake 9.2
installer put the OS on the unused space on your hard disk. Good luck and
read the Installation How To. One day you'll realise you haven't booted
Windows for weeks....

http://doc.mandrakelinux.com/Mandrak...l/install.html
http://lwn.net/Articles/14776/

--
B.Al.Zeebub
Registered Linux User #339345
Defenestrate Windows!

American Pi wrote:

Yes. The LILO entry you are seeing is in the Master Boot Record. Boot from a
WinXP setup disk and run

A:>fdisk /mbr

to restore the Master Boot Record and get rid of LILO.

Assuming that the hard drive is now in a state where there are no non-Linux
partitions and where the Windows XP partition is at the beginning of the
drive, nope: you're ready to go.

Now, bear in mind that Mandrake 10.0 is still in beta status and that you're
likely to have problems with it, especially if you're a newbie to Linux.
I'd advise using 9.1 or 9.2 rather than 10.0 until you've gotten your feet
wet and they've worked more bugs out of 10.0.

In either case, those versions will prompt you on what partitions to set up
and where. Generally, /root doesn't have to be more than 2GB at most, since
all it has is the operating system files (although if you're going to be
playing with kernel compiling you might consider making it bigger). /usr
needs to be fairly large since it's where your programs are installed. How
large? Depends on how much you're going to play with the thing. I'd think
that 4 gigs should fill the bill; I have a LOT of stuff installed and so
far I've used only about 1.2 gigs of a 4 gig partition.

It's a good idea to have /home and /swap as separate partitions. /swap
should be sized to roughly twice the amount of RAM you have installed, up
to 512MB--beyond that it makes no difference, if you have >512 or more of
RAM, 512MB of swap is quite sufficient. /home (where user data and
configuration stuff goes) will be the balance of the drive that's not
allocated to other partitions. Making /home a separate partition means that
you don't lose your program configuration settings and data if you have to
reinstall -- you have to reinstall the programs, yes, but they'll still
find their configurations in /home.

Good luck and congratulations upon weaning yourself from the Microsoft teat.

--
Gary G. Taylor * Rialto, CA
gary at donavan dot org / http:// geetee dot donavan dot org
"The two most abundant things in the universe
are hydrogen and stupidity." --Harlan Ellison

On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 23:49:43 +0000, American Pi pecked at a keyboard in
relief:

No worries. It would be unusual for data to survive a partition deletiion
and reformat, but it can happen. You could try erasing any data on the
effected partitions with Killdisk http://www.killdisk.com/features.htm
just to be on the safe side. There should be no need to remove Lilo prior
to reinstalling Mandrake - the bootloader occupies the first track of your
hard disc and is OS independent. It will be overwritten during the
installation of Mandrake anyway. Make sure you configure a /home
partition and if you screw up something (and you probably will) all your
data and configuration files will be safe. After you install Mandrake make
sure you update your installed software packages to fix any security holes
and bugs. Then use Drakbackup as a first line of defence against any slip
ups. You may wish to install Mondo Archive - a disc imaging utility - once
you get everything set up to save having to reinstall, download and set
everything up again. Here are a few links to assist your system set up.
Installing software, urpmi is a killer: it downloads and installs software
automagically.
http://urpmi.org/easyurpmi/index.php
Java and flash:
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat....i586.rpm.html
http://macromedia.mplug.org/
Don't forget alt.os.mandrake for posting intelligent questions after you
have Googled groups first.
Using commands:
http://www.cmm.uklinux.net/steve/ntt.html
I don't do IM, its just a time zone, hemisphere thing, and it's often
better to keep a thread going so other people may benefit. Good luck and
welcome to Mandrake.

--
B.Al.Zeebub
Registered Linux User #339345
Defenestrate Windows!