Mageia forum

Had perfectly tuned ssd/hdd dualboot Mageia2/win7 setup until attempted install of new nvidia video drivers messed things up. Tried to reinstall Mageia w/ livecd while keeping /home partition the same on my HDD. It went thru the whole process, formatting sda5 for / and would not boot afterward. Ok, no problem apparently. Attempt to start over again with Mageia, and everything goes fine , formatting, etc., then get a long pause during the copying files part and get the message saying installation failed, could not write to new root. Gparted cd would show whole disk as "unallocated." Win7 partition manager would show "free space" in the area in question but not allow expansion of the windows partition into it. Disk did not have too many primary partitions. Guess the freee space area was part of an extended partition(or was the extended partition). Got hold of another third party boot disk partition manager(name escapes me right now). Got rid of the "free space" and chaged to unallocated, and extended win7 partition into it, no problem. Had 30 gb left on the end of the ssd disk as unallocated and decided to install Mageia on that. went thru the installer, partitioned, set /, etc., and it hangs again with the copying files and the "could not write to new root" message. Live CD and windows working perfectly. Googling has not as of yet turned up a solution for me. Went ahead and installed Linux Mint 14 KDE there and it had no problems whasoever and I have all the stuff from /home still around, but I wish to be able to use Mageia as it seems to be a much better and more polished KDE experience. Linux Mint had no problems installing the nvidia driver through its "additional drivers" dialog. It has other issues, but I can use it for the time being. Any suggestion regarding getting Mageia back on this machine, or at least where to look for a solution...of course all important stuff backed up, maybe need to wipe the whole thing/image windows, etc., but sounds like a major pain to do it, as at least I do have linux working on it.

jmsms wrote:Had perfectly tuned ssd/hdd dualboot Mageia2/win7 setup until attempted install of new nvidia video drivers messed things up. Tried to reinstall Mageia w/ livecd while keeping /home partition the same on my HDD.

For one, why and how did you attempt to install new nvidia drivers. Did you maybe get them from nvidia website?
Also why did you reinstall the whole OS only for a broken graphics drivers? You could have easily booted failsafe mode,
fire up drakx11 and select nouveau, nv or vesa ...

Just shortened the whole thing because it was a done deal and basically irrelevant. I had an older nvidia card, gefroce 440 fermi card with ddr3 memory 512 and upgraded to a newer card. In MCC where the graphic system setup, would select nvidia 400 series or newer as seemed to be the newest entry and it asks about the proprietary driver at which point I said yes. It downloads and installs and asks to reboot and get stuck in a bunch of blue and white blocks and blotchy text and hangs with a "wait for Plymouth boot screen to quit" failure or something like that. would go to safe mode and go to vesa and then startup again and uninstall driver and try to use nouveau, which always would give me blurry and unreadable text. would then go to nvidia site and download theirs and run the installer as per instructions..the text somehow did not display properly for the yes and no boxes but managed to install and I got the system working again, for a few days, and later after some update or other, it was broken again. It was after a fair amount of going around and around with it again, and I was unable to get it going again, except in vesa, which would not fill the screen. Fooled around with it for awhile and just sort of quit. I looked around these forums for awhile and googled, and I guess I just became impatient and wanted to try something else, which is when I just backed up my important stuff and tried to reinstall...figured that would be faster than doing what I was doing, despite having to redownload all the updates, etc., and having the possibility of the same problem, and somehow with all of this repartitioning, etc, something messed up and cannot put Mageia back on this ssd as I stated before. My own fault. Basically was replacing the video card for something I was doing in Windows. I searched about quite a bit for the "unable to write to new root" issue and nothing seemed to fit, so I distro hopped and tried Mint KDE, which I do not care for after having used Mageia, but the computer at least is working and video driver works as well. I guess something happened to the partition table or something but I am just unsure what to do at this point to get back to Mageia, unless I put it on the HDD(after ssd I can't go back) or finding another inexpensive small ssd and putting it on that.

The Mageia 3 live dvd solved all of these issues(beta version had not). It detected the video card and installed the correct driver from the outset. No partitioning issues or "write to new root" error(which I have searched around for awhile without any result). Just a small amount of effort to put in the ssd stuff in fstab and for FF/chromium and it all works.