Problem with installing Mandriva 2007 to portable hard drive

[Leebaby]

December 2, 2006

I installed Mandriva 2007 to portable hard drive ( 80GB) once installed it gave me some options one was Linux or Windows and a few other options but basically once I selected Linux it loaded to ask me user name and password but then once I was in mouse cursor wouldn't move at all.

If I selected Windows It will load a normal Windows on my desktop computer. If I unplug the portable hard drive form my desktop computer It will start but will not load Windows. And I will get a series of zeros and ones and then it will stop.

It appears that somehow It needs to access the portable hard drive. Before I can load Windows because once I plug in the portable hard drive and select Windows under Mandriva 2007 (free version) that Widows loads properly with all my software intact.

Can anyone out there in cyber space, please give me some ideas and or help in this mater or a place that I could research this problem any help be highly appreciated.

sincerely,

Leebaby
EOM

[martinfromdublin]

Hi Leebaby, welcome to the forum!

I'm very much a newbie but I tried something similar a year ago with a Ubuntu disk onto an external drive. Tell me, when you were at the final part of the installation and were asked where to install the bootloader, where did you select? Was it your internal ('C' drive) or external drive? It sounds like the bootloader, or some portion of it is on your external drive.

You should be able to verify by opening the Mandriva Control Centre and checking in the 'boot' options where the bootloader has been installed.

Martin

[Leebaby]

December 3, 2006

Greetings Martin,

Yes I believe you have hit the nail on the head because it did ask me questions concerning about booting and I believe I did tell it to boot form the external drive. The question I have now is how does a novelist on Mandriva like me get to the control centre? Any thing you can do to help would be appreciated.

Leebaby form Florida USA
EOM

[martinfromdublin]

To get to the Mandriva Control Center;

System>Configuration>Configure your Computer. You'll be asked for your root password, then the Control Center will open. Click on 'Boot' and then 'Set up how the system Boots'. You should then have 'Bootloader' and 'Boot device', the latter has a drop down, see if you can change the source from there.

Good luck!

Martin