[Discuss] Boot Problems and Firefox

[Murray Strome]

The other day, I decided to update my Mandriva installation to Mandriva 
Free 2007. Everything went well until it got to the boot loader setup.  
I first tried LILO and it failed.  I then tried GRUB and it SAID it 
installed correctly. However, when I tried to reboot, I got GRUB -- then 
nothing.

I then loaded the Rescue part of the Mandriva DVD. I tried to reinstall 
LILO first -- it said something about my hard disks having the same 
something (I think it was 0x0340 and 0x0300 or something like that).  I 
then tried installing Kubuntu on some free space I had on one of my hard 
drives.  It also failed installing LILO, appeared to install GRUB -- but 
again it did not work.

I tried using my "Smart Boot Manager" floppy; with it, I could boot to 
my old Windows 98 installation, but when I tried to go to LINUX, I got 
GRUB then a whole bunch of "beeps" from my system speakers.

Next, I removed all the partitions I had used for Kubuntu and installed 
Fedora Core 6 in that empty space.  It installed OK, and a boot loader 
installed and sort of works -- it will boot to Red Hat only (the other 
options are not there).  In Mandriva, there is a place where you can 
modify the boot loader, but I cannot find a similar thing in Red Hat, so 
as of now I cannot boot into Mandriva.

I can at least access all my files from my old Mandriva install so I 
haven't lost much.  I am not that impressed with Red Hat, at least so 
far.  However, at least it is mostly working, except for being unable to 
use Firefox.  If I try to launch it, I get a message saying it is 
already running -- but it isn't (at least as far as I can tell).  I have 
uninstalled it, removed all the files and tried reinstalling it several 
times -- always the same result! 

I definitely prefer Mandriva, but cannot boot to it.  From what I have 
seen, I also like Kubuntu, but cannot get its boot loader to work 
either.  None of the new distributions seem to give me the option of 
creating a floppy boot loader.

Any ideas or hints?

Thanks.

Murray