Mandrake Misadventures and a happy ending

[Lee Einer]

Hi, All-

Sorry I was less than attentive at the meeting last night. There are 
happy experiences, and then there are learning experiences; my Mandrake 
install was one of the latter, but it all ended well. The upside is that 
I may have gained some knowledge which might come in handy at the 
Installfest.

I attempted, with the aid of some fellow PLUG members, to set up my PC 
with a triple boot- I already had Windoze 98 and Corel Linux set up with 
a dual boot, and was attempting to install Mandrake 8.2 as a third OS on 
the remaining space of my hard drive. When the install completed and I 
rebooted, the boot hung  with an LIL message.  The only way that we 
could get the Mandrake OS to boot was with a boot floppy, and Windoze 
and Corel both appeared to have left the building. Several hours of 
fiddling with settings, etc passed the time  (although I am sorry to 
have missed Robert's presentation) but with no positive effect.

This morning, after several hours of additional fiddling, I found the 
answer(s). Step one was to switch the boot loader from Lilo to Grub 
(Grub being reputedly less tempermental than Lilo.) This worked to the 
extent that I got a splash screen on reboot that offered me my choice of 
OSs. Windoze and Mandrake both booted from this screen with no problem; 
attempting to boot Corel Linux resulted in a  kernel panic. Bummer!

Step 2 was to go into control center and reconfigure the settings for 
the Corel partition from "Linux" to "other." Worked like a charm. 
Mandrake's boot manager apparently (like many critics) views Corel as 
being more Windows than Linux...

My thanks to Robert and Steve, both of whom came early to the PLUG 
meeting to help me with the install, and maintained patience and good 
cheer, even when I failed to. You guys are great!

Lee