After getting broadband I thought I should put it to good use by upgrading my Linux Mandrake, version 8.1, to the almost latest 9.1. I was going to download the ISOs and install from CD, but it looked faster doing a network install of only the bits I needed.
Completing the network install was ridiculously easy. Download a bootdisk image and Windows bootdisk creator, then boot from the aforementioned disk. When prompted, tell the install program the FTP or HTTP site to install from, and leave for many hours.
That part of the upgrade went well. Booting into Mandrake was more troublesome. Note that this installation is on a triple boot system (Win98/Win2000/Linux), with the Win2000 bootloader as boss.
Firstly, LILO stopped at LI. To resolve this I copied the bootsector from linux to the FAT32 boot partition again. This procedure is described by Anandtech.
The lovely detailed Linux boot info started scrolling past, but disconcertingly stopped at:
warning: unable to open initial console
After some investigation this turned out to be a /dev problem. Apparently the /dev file system was completely rewritten for Mandrake 9, and the upgrade hadn't fully compesated for it. Anyway, I solved this by booting with rescue disk, mounting the root filesystem, doing a chroot, and running makedev /dev, as described here.
The final error stopping the boot was
mounting proc filesystem Bad file descriptorI cured this quickly by some deleting of files, as specified in this procedure.
So, I got into X Windows only to find all my menu items had disappeared. This was cured by going into MenuDrake and selecting a (new) menu type.
After doing all this I now agree with those who recommend installing Mandrake afresh, rather than upgrading.
