My distro is Mandrake 9.1, which is running on an Intel 997 MHz processor with 512 MB Ram. I have two Maxtor ATA 133 hard drives--one 60 GB and one 80 GB.

Both hard drives are on IDE-1, the Primary ide controller. The 60 GB drive is the primary drive and the 80 GB drive is the secondary drive.

My CD-ROM is connected to IDE-2, the Secondary ide controller.

I have Windows XP and all of my other software loaded on a 17 GB primary partition of the 60 GB drive. The second partition on that drive is a logical partition and is used to store data.

The 80 GB drive has two partitions and a large amout of unallocated space. The Linux swap file is 1024 MB and the partition on which Linux is installed is 10 GB.

I have installed Linux on the 80 GB drive and everything is incredibly slow. The installation took over an hour. It takes forever to boot into Linux.

I deleted and recreated the partitions on the 80GB drive, reinstalled Linux, and the system is still as slow as ever.

Can anyone offer any suggestions on how to resolve this problem?

how long is 'forever'? And if you choose a whole lot of packages, it could very well over take over an hour to install mandrake.

You have to remeber that with a standard install, you are installing a lot of software with the OS. You normally get replacements for office, photoshop, winamp, and nero. Just think about the time involved in installing all that stuff after a windows install.

To speed up the boot process, you can turn off unneeded services. Open the mandrake control center and select "system" then "drakxservices". You will be able to read descriptions of services and uncheck anything you don't want to load at boot time. The boot process generally is a little slower than windows, but another thing to remember is that windows continues to load things after you see the desktop. In linux, when the boot prompt or graphical environment appears, it is ready to go.

Another thing is to try IceWM for your graphical environment. It mimicks windows 98 and loads very fast. It isn't as easy to configure as KDE or Gnome, but I like it.

Try to recompile the kernel, mkae it as small as posable, if it can be, set it as a module. Remember, anything that is compiled into the kernel stays in RAM, that means less RAM can be used by the system.