Mandriva 2007 not starting after installation

hi i installed Mandriva 2007 and had following problems please do help.... it seems its HP wide problem as its not installing in other laapies also in here.. except IBM thinkpads...


1. I installed Mandriva 2007 on my HP Pavillion dv5118tx laptop... it installed... i selected the documentation package and also in GUI i selected 1 more option... after restarting, when i selected the the OS to run.. it ran.. and after 1 minute as it was starting and loading.. shutting down comes and system shut downs...... i saw the commands to see wht happenes.. there was a laptop error or so.. and next it cam Kill All command.. after which it got shutdown.... please help

2. i formatted that drive and now after i format also the mandriva bootloader is coming... and i am forced to use it to go to my windows partition... please help me how to remove the bootloader....
thanks

 

1) Sounds like an ACPI issue with your laptop. Quite common, Dell, HP and others are notorious for not following the ACPI spec in their BIOS configurations.

2) I'm glad you didn't have grub in there, because otherwise your computer would be unbootable had you just formatted the drive. From inside windows, open a command window and type "fdisk /mbr" (make sure you don't have any USB flash drives or anything plugged in), and it should fix it for you.

 

hi thanks... i will surely do that.... as i am dual booting xp and vista ultimate also... and vista has its own boot loader.. from where shd i do that?... i will do it from vista.. ok...
And is that means that i cant use any linux distro ? please do help me and tell how to get past this hurdle and install linux?.....

Thanks again....

 

I don't know. I don't use vista, and refuse to do so on moral principles, so someone else can help you there. I have only ever used grub as the primary bootloader, mostly because it's much better and more flexible than the Windows bootloader. Those changes I said apply only to the grub loader, which is default on ubuntu.

 

Disclaimer: The following information is given as a best guess. I take no responsibility to the results of this experiment. This information is based off of publicly available information on recovering from certain other scenarios. If your computer stops booting up properly in either XP or Vista or both and/or your computer blows up I take no responsibility at all.

We may have to break your ability to boot Vista to even have a chance at getting rid of the Mandriva boot loader. If I am correct then your MBR was over-written with the Mandriva one. Neither XP nor Vista over-writes the boot loader in the MBR by default. They do it to the primary partition. This will allow you to tell XP to wipe the MBR and reinstall it's boot loader then you can get Vista to do the same..... hopefully. In order to prevent the damage though I would like you to try to just go to step 3 and see if it works.

1. Boot your Windows XP cd and use the Recovery option presented at the very beginning.

2. It will ask for which partition to login to and the password for the administrator account. Give it the information it requires.

3. At the prompt and type FIXMBR.

Now reboot and see if the Mandriva prompt disappears. If it does and you are able to boot both XP and Vista then STOP HERE.

If not then respond and I will post the rest.

 

hi... thanks for the reply... well i did wht pitabred said... it worked fine... but my OS got corrupted.. repaired vista and it worked .. booted.. but OS got corrupted... so did the clean clean installl....

Well can you guys tell which Linux distro will work.. and how to get around the ACPI issue in my laptop?

 

hi... can you say which distro of linux will work? or how to get around ACPI?