On 2011/08/01 20:51 (GMT+0800) george olson composed:
I have a new hard drive that I just put on an old pc. I am experimenting around with things, and this is the sequence of what has happened.
- first, I installed suse 11.4 and ran it ok for a few days. Had some problems with the monitor and networking. - I installed windows xp in place of suse 11.4, over-writing the hard drive with windows xp files. I needed to check some things. - I reinstalled suse 11.4 and again it ran ok once. On the install I wiped over completely all the windows xp files (using the suse installation utility) - the next day I brought my computer to a tech store to purchase a new motherboard. Before the purchase, we turned it on to boot up to suse 11.4 from the hard drive, and it would not boot up. It said "error loading boot system" or something like that. It did not make it anywhere even near loading anything from the hard drive, as if the hard drive failed. This was only the 2nd time that I powered up the pc after re-installing suse 11.4.
The old motherboard and/or power supply might be failing. The new motherboard and CPU might require more power than the old can provide. How many watts is the PS rated for? What are your new motherboard and CPU model numbers?
- I installed the new motherboard (to get more memory) and again tried to boot from the hard drive, and it would not boot from the hard drive
Likely the HD driver installed for the old motherboard didn't match that required by the new.
- I booted from the cd and went to re-install suse completely again. It ran through the whole setup sequence and did not indicate any errors. I did a complete re-install from the beginning. It performed the initial re-boot as part of the install sequence and brought up KDE. There was a problem with my video driver or something, as my screen only showed a series of horizontal lines of alternating green white and black colors. There was nothing readable.
Maybe your new motherboard has an onboard video chip that isn't recognized by openSUSE by default. Run the lspci command and share with us the information from the line that includes "VGA".
- I did a ctrl-alt-f2 and brought up the terminal window, but I didn't really know what to do from there because I am not really familiar with the commands. At this point I thought my only problem was the video driver. - I powered off the pc.
Bad practice. You should run 'init 0' or the shutdown command to shut the system down before powering off, or 'init 6' or reboot to reboot.
- later I tried to boot up again, and again I got the same error as before "error loading boot system" and it did not get close to loading linux at all. That is the way it is now when I try to boot up from the hard drive.
Did you try the "Failsafe" menu option?
- I put in the install disk again and went to "rescue system". I typed in "root" as the login with a blank password, and got a terminal command.
That is where I am now. I can get into the rescue system but not much else. I can't imagine that my hard drive has failed, as it is only 1 week old. I think that when I installed windows xp on it, microsoft did something to prevent me from installing another system over the top of xp, and now I can't access anything.
More than likely you accepted the defaults when installing Windows, allowing XP to do as it pleased with the HD, overwriting all that was there.
I remember on the setup having 3 partitions, as swap, a root, and a home. I had the max size on all 3, I think they were 2gb, 20gb, and 465gb or something like that. I have a 500gb drive.
So, can someone help me first of all to get my directories back? I only know enough to get into the rescue system. I don't know the commands to use from the rescue system, or what to do from there. If I need to provide any more information, please tell me what commands I need to use to find it out.
If you need or want to have a computer with both Windows and Linux, probably the place to start is learning what multiboot is, e.g. http://fm.no-ip.com/PC/partitioningindex.html and http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Partitioning If you want to start by installing Windows again, just be sure to have it use only as much of the HD as you want it to, reserving for Linux however much you choose. While stuck with a non-working X desktop, you can nevertheless accomplish much even without knowing a whole lot about commands. Midnight Commander (the mc command from a text login) provides utility similar to Windows Explorer and various Linux X file managers, allowing to navigate, view, edit, copy, rename and other things with files and directories, all the while viewing the filesystem in one or two panes. If mc is not installed but you can log in and access the network (test with 'ping www.google.com'), then you can do 'zypper in mc' to install it in a matter of a minute or so. You should be able to use mc to copy the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file somewhere we can see it. It will tell many things about X, giving us clues why you didn't get an expected usable desktop. http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Configuring_graphics_cards should help you get a working X, maybe without our help. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org