Twin City FM Club

Sorry that this message has taken so long to get back to you.

Your first step should be to get a live linux distribution CD, (just about any should do) and check to see what all the recovery console did. If it only updated the MBR with the instructions to boot Windows, you may be all right. There are instructions on the net for useing the Windows boot loader to kick off Linux, though I have not used that facility, nor have I recommendations on it. I also am not sure if that was just an NT4 feature, or if it was carried into XP as well.

If you installed Debian onto a seprate Hard Disk, or the partitions were not over-written, you should be able to reinstall the boot loader from your instalation disks for Linux. Most of them have a recovery mode as part of their bootup routine, and you can specify that you want to re-install the boot loader, and reboot without making any other changes.

If however, the live linux distribution indicates that Windows Recovery Console has wiped the partitions as well as replacing the mbr, you will have to re-install Linux yes.

Hope this is helpful, or at least points someone in the right direction.

73,

-Rusty - kc0vcu

It appears that what happened is that when you upgraded the kernel, whatever boot loader you have installed elected to throw away the current list of possible boot options and generate it's own new list.

What you needed to do would depend upon whether you are using lilo or grub as the boot loader.

Under Lilo you edit the lilo.conf file in the /etc folder, and follow the instructions for Lilo to add the option for Windows back to the selection list. There may be a lilo.conf~ file that has the old information for you from before you did the kernel update.

Once you have made the necessary modifications you run the 'lilo' command at a root command prompt, and the boot sector is updated with the appropriate information to select boot options the next time you reboot.

Grub is a little bit different. Grub uses a boot sector very similar to the Windows boot sector, i.e. it's just enough information to point at what partition the boot information can be found on, and that's it. The advantage of this is that when you make changes to the menu.lst file, you don't need to run any special commands to make the changes functional at boot time.

In a directory named /boot/grub you will find a file named menu.lst which is what you need to modify to add your windows partition back into the boot menu.

Grub has become the prefered boot loader for many distributions, and you may find the Mini-HowTo at http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Multiboot-with-GRUB.html useful in modifying your menu.lst file. I would recommend using the listed menu.lst file as a sample, and compare it to the one on your system, making modifications to the one on your system, not copying the provided edition verbatum. Your system very likely does not look like the system the writer was using when he created that FAQ. Likewise your edition of Grub very likely has different paramaters from the edition he was using.

Hope this helps in some way.

73,

-Rusty - kc0vcu

On the off chance you are still having this problem, one of the things you can try is to look at the results of loking up those various locations with dig. If you open a command prompt and type 'dig www.google.com' you are likely to get a response that includes the lines:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com. 387276 IN CNAME www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com. 182 IN A 72.14.203.99
www.l.google.com. 182 IN A 72.14.203.104

The actual values may be different, as this is the result I got at the time I put together this message. If you get a result either without an ';; ANSWER SECTION:' or with one that has addresses you can't get a respnse from, you may have a misconfigured resolve.conf file. This should be being updated automatically by dhcp, however if you are behind a firewall, and are not using your firewall as your dns server, you may have out-dated information in the resolve.conf file. Log into your router and find out what it is currently using for DNS and re-config the devices that need it.

It is also possible that youa re attempting to connect through a proxy such as privoxy, or squid, that has incorrect information. Fixing that is going to involve digging into the configuration files, or the interactive configuration process. There is more information on that available online. I believe both have a Wiki that provides amoung other things an FAQ for configuring the devices.

If you are unsure if you are using one or another proxies, you can check via the debian menu for settings and proxy settings. In Firefox you can also check under the settings Privacy tab I believe, though it may be under Connections.

73,

-Rusty - kc0vcu

When you format a hard drive, the system wants to know where to add the newly formated partition to your file system.

As you are building a system, the first mount point will be '/'. This is the starting point for file systems. There are several 'common' mount points that often get added when you build a system, examples are /boot, /home, /usr, /var. Because these are commonly used, they will show up in the gui and semi-gui tools that format drives, along with a 'blank' entry where you can add your own mount point.

Let's say you are adding a hard drive to give you more space in your personal folders. Perhaps you like to edit video, or just get a lot of e-mail and have decided to keep all of it. So you go to a local retailer and pick up a 250 gig drive. You can either mount this to a folder within your home directory, perhaps as 'Documents', or 'WorkInProgress', or you can even use the entire drive as your home folder.

If you want to use it as a 'WorkInProgress' folder, you would replace the /boot entry given, with /home/username/WorkInProgress and go ahead and format the drive. You may be prompted to allow the application to create the mount point, or the tool may do that for you without prompting. If you want to use it as your new home directory, set the mount point to /home/username.

In both cases replace 'username' with the name of your login account.

For what it's worth, if I am going to replace an existing folder with a new partition, I will tell the system to mount the new partition to /mnt/tempfoldername and copy the existing contents of the old folder to that folder, edit the /etc/fstab file to point the new partition at the desired mount point, remove the contents of the old folder, then unmount the new partition, and mount it to it's new location.

If you want to do something like this, you will want to go through the man for the tool you are using to copy files (usually cp or possibly rsync) and use the parramaters that retain ownership and group information, otherwise all the files will suddenly be owned by whatever user you are logged in as. It makes it handy for you to access them, but may cause problems for applications that are expecting the files to be owned by some other id.

73,

-Rusty - kc0vcu

dselect, apptitude and synaptic package manager all provide you with a mechanism to install applications that use the debian package management system. You may find that in some cases you do not have access to one or another of these tools, and have to revert to one of the others.

If you have played around with each of the tools, and gotten familiar with how each works, what the differences and commonalities are, it makes it easier to assist others on systems you are otherwise less familiar with.

For this reason you may want to take a look at a couple of other distributions, and become familiar with the tools that they use to manage packages. Mandriva/Mandrake uses urpmi, or its own gui. SuSe uses Yast (I think) and so on. You may find that on some systems it is easier to install packages via WebMin.

This is also true for various other tools you may work with from time to time on your own system(s) as well as on systems that others may own. It's probably one of the few reasons to become familiar with Koffice tools, as well as Gnome applications. They each work a little different, but by being familiar to some degree with each, you will find it easier to use whatever happens to be available. Granted there isn't a lot out there that compares to editing with vi, but you get the idea.

73

-Rusty - kc0vcu

Two things...

1) Make sure the discs you burn are "finalized", which commits the table-of-contents to the disc in a permanent fashion.

2) Windows 98SE, ME, XP, etc all use an extension to the ISO9660 filesystem called "Juliet", which provides long filenames along with some other windows-friendly conveniences. If you're burning a disc for use on both Linux and Windows systems, you can (probably: should) enable both Juliet and RockRidge extensions to make both platforms happy.

73,
--
Peter, KC0TFB, Your Friendly TCFMC.org Webmaster

Without knowing a bit more about what tools you are using, it may be hard for someone to help you identify where to look. In some cases the information needed to specifically select between ISO-9660 and UDF may be an option for the application over-all, in other cases it may be a disk by disk burning option that may, or may not, store what your desired option is for later use.

If the tool you are using gives you the option at each burn to turn on, or off features, say RockRidge extentions, or Juliet, you may want to search the options there for ISO vs. UDF formating.

In any case this is usually done by the mkisofs portion of the disk burning tool. In the various gui's this may, or may not, be separate from the burning options. It may be associated with the drag/drop portion where you can build the image that will be burned to the disk, but is unlikely to be on the same page as what speed to burn the CD at, or whether to have burnfree enabled.

73,

-Rusty - kc0vcu