so i have finally gotten sick of microsoft and decided to venture into the realms of linux.
i got a mandrake distro with a magazine and tried to do a clean install on one of my old computers.
so i formatted and got rid of windows using the mandrake installer.
then it started doing it's thing and installing but it kept coming up saying stuff like... "blah.blah failed to install continue anyway?".
i continued and it got pretty far... up to the bit where you put in the bootloader.
then it just kept saying "bootloader failed" or something and wouldn't let me proceed.
i guess the kernel was screwed or something.
but now i can't do anything. i tried to format the drive again using the xp installer and it said that it can't do it... and when i boot up the mandrake installer it starts and then says it's sorry and can't continue.
do i need to make a boot disk so i can format?
i kinda know whats going on but am not a genius.
any help would be appreciated... the computer is not great but should run it fine.
thanks!

I would try using the XP disk to boot, go to repair, and run fixmbr. When linux installs (or tries to) it puts a boot loader called lilo on the disk, and windows has a problem getting rid of this unless you fix the master boot record by running fixmbr.

As for the errors, I'm not sure, but perhaps go to the mandrake website (http://www.mandrakelinux.com) and download and burn to CD the latest version of Mandrake, that is, if you have Broadband internet. It should run on pretty much any system, although Mandrake is somewhat optimized from the basic Linux kernel, so it might have higher requirements than your basic Linux distribution. I'm not sure what kind of computer you're trying to run it on, but if you have no luck maybe try a different distribution to see if that fixes it. Good luck.