[ale] First time trashing Linux

[James P. Kinney III]

Sounds unpleasant. Soorry to hear about the problems. A couple of
pointers since you profess you're a it new to the Linux realm.

Never install "daily builds" of anything if you want your box to keep
running!! 

the command "dir" is a DOS command. The *nix predecessor is ls. 

You should be able to repair your system by booting from the CD and
running the  "upgrade". It will replace what is missing  and broken and
get you back going again. This time make a boot disk :)

Get a copy of Toms root boot disk and keep it handy. Learn how to use
it. It can save your tail from a major foul up by giving you a good tool
supply to work from on a single floppy. A second great emergency tool is
the bootable business card linux. I was able to extract data from a
partially corupted NTFS (WinXP home) box by burning it directly to a CD
burner.

On Sat, 2003-01-25 at 17:57, Neal Wilkinson wrote:
> I'm a new Linux user and am running Mandrake 9.0. I've run it several months
> without many problems. I upgraded my Mozilla to 1.3a and everything was fine
> until I had a sudden urge to use online banking. I had originally installed
> without having Personal Security Manager for some reason. It seems like the
> first time the install wasn't run from a GUI so maybe that is why and I just
> missed the switch. Anyhow that was several weeks ago and it has worked fine.
> I downloaded the most recent "nightly build" and ran the install. It was GUI
> and had PSM checked by default. The first time I tried to install it I got
> about 7 error messages but they were really blank buttons, no real info
> gleaned here except the install didn't work. The next time it went fine but
> did ask me to uninstall the copy on the system. It did this for me
> supposedly. After the install it wouldn't run so I rebooted under the
> thought that doing something totally irrevelant might fix the problem. When
> I boot I get a couple of error messages that I haven't had before both
> related to files in /usr/bin which is where the install and removal were
> taking place. I then go right to bash and never make it to KDE. Of course I
> have no emergency boot disk. I created a boot floppy from another system but
> it provides the same results. I have run fsck without it fixing anything but
> it seems to run awfully fast. I'm not really sure where to go next and would
> welcome a hint or two. Being still very Linux stupid I don't have the
> mindset yet to troubleshoot effectively. The dir command won't work anymore
> which I found odd but that may be something simple. ls works fine. Any idea
> on where I should start? I'd be happy to provide more specific information
> error messages etc. if it might help. It appears to me that the boot process
> isn't finishing for some reason. Since I can't imagine how Mozilla could do
> this I'm thinking that something must be corrupt. Thanks.
> 
> Neal
> 
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> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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