I have sifted through as many posts as I have time to, and this may have been covered before but did not see it, so I will be brief. I am attempting to install Mandrake 9 on a Compaq Presario 1640. AMD 266, 96MB RAM, 4 GB HD. Hard drive is empty and partitionless. Booting from cd(downloaded and burned 3 ISO's), goes to graphical choice, to hit Enter to install or F1 for options. Either choice yields same ultimate result. Will reach the stage where it says "Loading program into memory...", and will hang there indefinitely. Hitting Alt-F4 reveals same repeated error,

<4>hdc: irq timeout: 0xd0 { Busy}
<4>hdc: ATAPI reset complete

Hitting Alt-F3 reveals that it is "trying to load /tmp/image/Mandrake/base/ mdkinst_stage2.bz2 as a ramdisk." I can hear the drive spinning up and down all the while. I am a total twit when it comes to Linux, this is my very first experience with it. Please help.

My first inclination is to say you have a bad burn... the "hdc" designation refers to the master device on your secondary IDE channel (probably your CD drive). It's telling you it could not successfully load some data from the CD into memory.

A typical cause for something like this is a corrupt file.

When you download an ISO, typically you can find an MD5 sum. It's sort of like a CRC, digital signature, or however you'd like to think of it. You can download a program (I think it's called MD5Summer or something like that) that will calculate the MD5 sum of the ISO image you downloaded and compare it against what it's supposed to be. You can download ISO images from www.linuxiso.org. I know they provide MD5 sums for their files.

In addition, it could just be a bad burn to CD. If you burn the images again, I'd suggest a slower burn speed just to be on the safe side.

Thanks a bunch for the suggestion, Dark, about MD5Summer, there is a site dedicated to that very program. It is very handy for verifying those ISO's. In the meantime since my original post, I have downloaded the 5 ISO's of Red Hat 8.0, analyzed them, and I am happy to say that it installed immediately. Though it is not the distro I wanted to toy with, I am happy to see this work. Am I really losing anything by Red Hat 8 working and not Mandrake 9? And to make a small comment- man this takes a long time to install! lol

Just my 2 cents, but no, you're not. RH has better updating support and now you can use apt-get and synaptic to upgrade packages and kernels or to remove them. It keeps the grub.conf files updated when kernels come and go and lots of other stuff. It does a great job. MDK update site never has packages available for me, so updating is very frustrating. RH and freshrpms sources have always been up for me and fast too. Usually 100kbs+ on my cable modem.

Check out this article on how to install and use apt-get, synaptic, ogle dvd player, etc. with KDE on RH 8.0. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1890 PS, I've installed 8.0 so many times now I just go to this article and cut and paste the commands into the shell (yes, you can do that in 8.0) and have apt-get, synaptic, xmms mp3 working, ogle installed,etc, in about 10 minutes. Apt-get and synaptic are a must for 8.0.