I have been using Mandrake 9.1 for a year and a half and decided to try 10.1. I downloaded the 3 iso's and burned 3 cd's from them. The md5 sums all checked out okay on the iso's. The 3 cd's worked fine in installing Mandrake 10.1. The problem came went I rebooted to get into the system. The boot stops at checking for new hardware. I went in interactive and told it not to check for hardware. It stopped looking for my sound card. To make a long story short I had to tell it not to check for hardware, not to look for soundcard, not to look for video card, not to load CUPS, and not to load bluetooth. As you can imagin not much worked when i did get in. I checked the few things that did work and it seemed to be set right. I downloaded the iso's from a different site recheck the md5 sums and burn new cd's. It loaded fine but same problem, it won't boot. Any help on this? Thanks

The hardware detection can fault with quite new hardware. It's OK. What You can do about this, is google it ;-). You know Your hardwaer and there is big probability that You are not the only one with this harware and Linux. So, find out exactly which drivers you need and select them manually during installation.
I hope this helped a bit.

Did you do a complete reinstall, or did you do an upgrade from 9.1? Just a possibility - Mandrake 'upgrades' can go a bit astray..

I did have this problem myself once with 10.1, albeit under slightly different circumstances - I was trying to boot the alternative 2.4 kernel instead of the default 2.6, and each time it hung on hardware detection (harddrake)...i have no idea why! it may, or may not, be part of the problem you're experiencing.

Yano; On installation I checked the settings and the only thing that wasn't right was my mouse. It setup for a 2 button mouse instead of a wheel mouse. When I did manage to get in the mouse worked fine. Still can't boot up into 10.1. Thanks for the advice.

kevinatkins; I did a complete new install. The kernal that it said it was using was the 2.6 kernal. Still doesn'r boot. It's interesting to know some else has this problem too. There has to be something to do about it.

Ran into the same "hang" on hardware detection. For some reason, Bluetooth was installed automatically, AND TURNED ON. I have no Bluetooth capability, whatsoever, on my Server.... This suggests the
New Hardware" detection script is a mess.

Got a phone call, came back 45 minutes later, and the Server had booted. Logged in and turned off Bluetooth and a few other network related daemons/services that had been mysteriously added or been set to turn on at bootup.

Try looking for this nonsense in your Services settings, and turn off what was errorenously turned on or added. Given time (often an hour or more), Linux will almost always boot, if it booted before.

Now my network operations are fine, but I have lost ALSA ("snd_ctrl not present"), KDE (memory is swallowed, X crashes, even after patches applied) and my printer, an HP OfficeJet 6110xi, that simply no longer works.... Strangely, the rpinter is now correctly identified (was identified as a 6105, but it worked then), and all features are correctly detected, just no output - all jobs are "Aborted" in the que log....

Other than this, and the odd Nautilus windows without a means of easy interaction [now], it seems to work ok, with about 10% of the functionality missing. If this is an example of the direction of Mandrake development, they perhaps should contemplate a "rollback" feature. Wish I had one....

As happy as I am with Mandrake, I am considering this a fluke, and expect these key functionality issues to be resolved pretty darn quick....

In the meantime, any suggestions will be very welcome! Thanks!

Fudoki

fudoki; I found that if I used the 2.4 kernal it would at least boot. Now things aren't running very fast and some crash for no reason. My printer and sound card work fine. I've used Mandrake from 7.2 on up and this is the most disappointing version yet. I think they are taking lessons from M$. I would like to go back to 9.1 or 9.2 they worked great but I no longer can get the updates for the old versions. Thanks for the info. I'm looking at other versions of linux, maybe there is something better.

fudoki,

yeah, i noticed the same thing about bluetooth when i did a 10.1 install. thankfully, during the installation process, i had a glance at which services had been enabled and was able to turn bluetooth off. i also noticed that hotplug was turned off by default, which seems like a strange thing to do, but there you go...

i found that 10.1 was simply awful - harddrake was a nightmare and there were problems with the new udev system that simply weren't present using the old devfs (ubuntu, by contrast, and which also uses udev, works like a charm - as udev is supposed to!!).... i ended up going back to 10.0, which while very far from perfect, is at least 99% useable..

as regards ALSA - i've also tangled with this on 10.0.. i found that, having made a change to a module parameter for a non-sound related item using mandrake's tools, en erroneous parameter entry had been inserted into /etc/modprobe.conf for the sound driver! Bizarre (or, typical Mandrake...) - removing the entry restored correct ALSA operation..

That's the thing - Mandrake's config tools are, in my experience, dreadful. They might look nice, they might be easy to use - but all too often, they screw up. SuSE's YaST, whilst nowhere near as easy and intuitive to use, is far, far better - it simply works... And it gives a user far more control over hardware..

But all said and done, I do rather like Mandrake once it's set up - it's just such a nice looking, good performing distro, with a very enthusiastic following and very good support in the shape of Mandrake Club.