wa4chq Posted December 11, 2016 Author Share Posted December 11, 2016 (edited) Hi Securitybreach. yes, I know it doesn't make any sense. I guess the real reason is installing from slackware would take care of the editing problem..... Grub is not as user friendly as Grub-legacy. I spent a couple of days looking up how to edit grub..... But your are right, I need to quit messing with it if it works...... I'll leave it for a while, and that's not easy... Edited December 12, 2016 by wa4chq Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted December 12, 2016 Share Posted December 12, 2016 Quit tweakin' around. You're gonna' break sumthin'. If you want to really have some fun, go install Gentoo. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 12, 2016 Share Posted December 12, 2016 Quit tweakin' around. You're gonna' break sumthin'. If you want to really have some fun, go install Gentoo. Or LFS.. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Capt.Crow Posted December 12, 2016 Share Posted December 12, 2016 Or DSL. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 12, 2016 Share Posted December 12, 2016 Why DSL? It is considered an out of the box experience..minimal but a complete live environment unlike LinuxFromScratch and Gentoo which make you compile every single aspect of your installation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted December 13, 2016 Share Posted December 13, 2016 (edited) I think he meant ---. This post redacted by the author. Edited December 14, 2016 by V.T. Eric Layton 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 13, 2016 Share Posted December 13, 2016 I think he meant LSD. Right... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted December 13, 2016 Author Share Posted December 13, 2016 (edited) Quit tweakin' around. You're gonna' break sumthin'. If you want to really have some fun, go install Gentoo. It's meant to be... I gotta say, Gentoo is one I haven't tried. My first was Red Hat 7.1 Bought the disk set at Office Max. I hadn't a clue as to what I was doing. My first screw up was partitioning. I don't think I ever got it working properly after that. But my first proud moment was with an old Toshiba lappy I had. Bought it used and came with win 95. I ended up putting dos on it after hosing w95 (Not understanding any of but loved the colors etc) I still wanted to become a linux guy so I found this:http://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/ I dual booted using loadlin. Now I was moving up! I was starting to have fun. Where I go wrong is not being able to just install it and then leave it. I gotta mess with it. My biggest problem is not keeping a notebook of what I'm doing when the urge hits. I have learned from some of my mistakes, just not all of my mistakes..... Edited December 13, 2016 by wa4chq 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted December 13, 2016 Author Share Posted December 13, 2016 (edited) Or LFS.. I actually wanted to try Linux from Scratch just to say I did but didn't. If I had, I'd end up using it for a while then move on to something else..... A buddy of mine gave me 6 or 8 Debian disks years ago (woody). I installed that but decided I needed to customize (compile) the kernel because of what I had read in the post installation. Well, it worked...don't know how or why, but it did. But I'm never gonna do that again!! Or DSL. D*** Small Linux may have been my first live linux. I liked it at the time. Edited December 13, 2016 by wa4chq 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted December 13, 2016 Author Share Posted December 13, 2016 I think he meant LSD. Linux Special Disks? 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted December 14, 2016 Share Posted December 14, 2016 (edited) Umm... no. --- --- ---. "--- --- ---" This post redacted by the author. Edited December 14, 2016 by V.T. Eric Layton 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 14, 2016 Share Posted December 14, 2016 Let's refrain from drug or adult references as this is a "family" forum. Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted December 14, 2016 Share Posted December 14, 2016 Let's refrain from drug or adult references as this is a "family" forum. Thanks I'd better change me tux then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 14, 2016 Share Posted December 14, 2016 Let's refrain from drug or adult references as this is a "family" forum. Thanks I'd better change me tux then. Well I am a bit lax on things but sometimes I have to act like I am in charge... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted December 14, 2016 Share Posted December 14, 2016 You are absolutely correct, Josh. My apologies to the community. I'll edit the above posting. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burninbush Posted December 15, 2016 Share Posted December 15, 2016 Quit tweakin' around. You're gonna' break sumthin'. If you want to really have some fun, go install Gentoo. It's meant to be... I gotta say, Gentoo is one I haven't tried. My first was Red Hat 7.1 Bought the disk set at Office Max. I hadn't a clue as to what I was doing. My first screw up was partitioning. I don't think I ever got it working properly after that. But my first proud moment was with an old Toshiba lappy I had. Bought it used and came with win 95. I ended up putting dos on it after hosing w95 (Not understanding any of but loved the colors etc) I still wanted to become a linux guy so I found this:http://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/ I dual booted using loadlin. Now I was moving up! I was starting to have fun. Where I go wrong is not being able to just install it and then leave it. I gotta mess with it. My biggest problem is not keeping a notebook of what I'm doing when the urge hits. I have learned from some of my mistakes, just not all of my mistakes..... Sorry I missed this earlier ... if I understand your situation, you can still boot Windows? If so, then there's a very simple way to turn [windows] bootmgr into a multi-boot loader. --Locate which disk partition holds bootmgr. It's often on a hidden first partition. Boot with some linux live cd to make it easy to look for it. --download a copy of grub4dos, and extract from it two files, named grldr and grub.com. You might also want their version of menu.lst. Copy all three of those to the same directory as bootmgr. --rename bootmgr to bootmgr7 [assuming we're talking win7], any name is OK, the idea is to hide the stock file when windows boots up. -- copy grldr to bootmgr [to replace the file you just renamed]. That's it, you are done now. When you boot windows, it'll load grldr instead, which brings up grub.com which runs any existing copy of menu.lst, which is where you tell grub what distro to boot first. If you want to run windows, just make an entry that chainloads bootmgr7 [the renamed file], and then you're back running the standard win7 bootup. If you want to revert to the original windows bootup, just rename the bootmgr7 back to bootmgr. Takes longer to explain than it takes to get it to work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted December 16, 2016 Author Share Posted December 16, 2016 Good morning Multithreader.... Thanks for the info. My problem wasn't about getting windows back, it was with grub and/or lilo on my main laptop and being able to boot Archbang or Slackware. I installed Slack last but in years past, I've had issues with boot loaders and dual booting, so I opted not to install lilo when setting up Slack and just went with booting it from a thumb drive. If I wanted to use AB, I let grub handled it. Well, with some guidance (and scolding) from the BATL guys, I've got Slack booting from grub now..... how long I stay with grub, who knows.... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted December 16, 2016 Share Posted December 16, 2016 You are absolutely correct, Josh. My apologies to the community. I'll edit the above posting. Thanks 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted December 18, 2016 Author Share Posted December 18, 2016 (edited) It's all coming back to me now..... When I first bought this Lenovo, it had Win7?? on it. I partitioned the HD for Archbang and for /home. All lived well together until I was messing with live distro's on a usb. In the process of using gparted and formatting the usb, I made an error and formatted the windows partition instead. So now I couldn't boot Arch. I used a live distro I had to get grub working so I could at least boot Archbang. Which brings me to why I'm seeing something on my screen when I boot. I will try and get a picture of it and post it. Edited December 23, 2016 by wa4chq Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted December 23, 2016 Author Share Posted December 23, 2016 (edited) OK, here's what I see when I boot. I repaired grub a few years ago when I accidentally wiped out a rather large file (using Gparted) I had partitioned the hard drive and had ArchBang on one, Windows on another......luckily AB was not hosed but I could no longer boot. I don't remember the name of the distro now, I had it on a disk then put it on a thumb drive....it was a "swiss army knife" so to speak and was for a while free but later changed to costing maybe $15.... anyway, it is what I used to repair grub. After showing this screen, it goes into grub mode.... I now have Slackware 14.1 on a another partition and is the main os.... I AM NOT GONNA MESS WITH IT!!!! IT WORKS....I CAN BOOT BOTH DISTROS......I AM NOT GONNA MESS WITH IT!!!! IT WORKS!!!! UPDATE: Parted Magic is what I used..... Edited December 23, 2016 by wa4chq 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted December 23, 2016 Share Posted December 23, 2016 It works. That's all you can ask for. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted December 23, 2016 Author Share Posted December 23, 2016 It works. That's all you can ask for. The sad part is I actually did try installing LILO on the Slack partition last week after I said I wasn't going to mess with it! Guess what happened? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted December 23, 2016 Share Posted December 23, 2016 Well, since installing LILO on a partition is worthless unless you plan to chainload using GRUB, my guess is that when you ran LILO from within Slack, it wiped your GRUB off the disk's boot sector. Do I get a cookie? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wa4chq Posted December 23, 2016 Author Share Posted December 23, 2016 No, not quite. When I rebooted I was met with GRUB. So I scrolled down to start Slack. I like to boot to console and startx so all was fine until I executed my alias for startx....x.....well, SPECTRWM should have come up but it didn't. I got an error message. But if I changed my .xinitrc to boot KDE, that worked. I was puzzled. Switched to ArchBang and installed SPECTRWM and copied my .spectrwm.conf from Slack to AB. Rebooted to AB and SPECTRWM didn't work...same error message, but if I used the default .spectrwm.conf, it worked. So back over to Slackware and with an old config file I had saved, I was able to startx......long story short, I was able to fix it and now back in action with my window manager of choice and my Distro of choice..... There is a Santa Claus! Hey, Merry Christmas! 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted December 24, 2016 Share Posted December 24, 2016 Ah... well, I didn't need another cookie, anyway. I've been munching the ones set aside for Santa for two days already. Now that I'm a senior citizen, I prefer that schitt just works. Know-whad-ah-meen? 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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