I installed Mandrake Linux on a machine connected to a network. Everything installed and worked fine until I disconnected the machine from the network. Now when it boots up it complains about some problem with the ethernet card and hangs. The screen goes blank and the PC is completely unresponsive. I've not been able to boot this machine successfully since I went off the network. What could the problem be? How could such a minor hardware alteration bring a Linux distro to its knees?

I have the same thing, see linux is trying to get an ip addy. Your best bet is toplug it back in and tweak the config files (not sure how, never did it) to not bring up eth0 and then your okay, or maybe you could use lilo to boot linux sinlge and edit them fromthere, that is prolly easier

That's a problem for me since I no longer have physical access to the network. What do you mean be "boot linux sinlge" (I assum you meant single)? Which config files would I need to edit?

Thanks for the help.

He means boot up into single user mode. This can be done by holding down 'I' for a while when Mandrake says "Press I to enter Interactive setup".

You will be asked for the root pass after which a menu will pop up giving you the option of booting in to one of three modes (graphical, text and maintenance iirc). Maintenance mode can be used to change configuration files and remove the networking stuff that's bothering you.

On my computer it would probably suffice to edit /etc/sysconfig/network and set NETWORKING to no.

I'm not sure if that's still the case on your version of Mandrake, but just look around the network related scripts in /etc/sysconfig and you'll find a way.