ok, i'm a serious newbie, i've only dabbled in this linux stuff. So i got mandrake 9.1 off the net, seeing as it's prolly the most ignoramus friendly distro. Anyway, i burned the iso's and booted up my pc. (The setup's about like this

Aopen Ax6lc mobo
PIII running at 417mhz??? (board won't clock higher) but it's rated at 500.
224 ram
two possible hdd's: wd caviar 4 gig, seagate 10 gig


Here's the problem: I boot fine from the cd, and start the installation. Everything goes great until the partitioning step. When it says it's getting the ide info, the installation tells me "i can't find any room for installing". So what gives? I tried it with both hard drives, both partitioned and formatted with FAT32 fs. The drives are not faulty, i've checked them. On the caviar 4 gig i ran windows me just fine. However, i had to clone someone's hdd to do that b/c when i tried to install Xp pro or win2000 pro on the same machine, same configs... it would freeze after the initial driver loads, before the setup program actually starts. HELP!!

Hi Johnathan

Mandrake needs to use a Linux filesystem like ext3 to install onto - you dont install Linux distributions on FAT32 filesystems

Let Mandrake delete all existing partitions and let it install itself onto a proper linux filesystem.

oh yeah i know, but it never gets that far... before the partition portion of install starts, that's when it hangs with the message "i can't find any room to install"... it never gives me the option to repartition or anything

sorry i wasn't clear in the first message.... before i ran installation i wiped my hard drive and partitioned it into 2 partitions with fdisk in dos. then i formatted each partition it using the dos format utility. THEN i ran mandrake setup