I hope someone can answer this.....
 

as most of you have probably heard, i have been having problems recently with my linux. Well i've uninstalled and reinstalled and have come to the conclusion that there is not enough memory to bring up the display. I have recently borrowed a copy of a purchased Linux Mandrake 7.1. When i popped it in my machine and waited for it to boot, it showed the copyright etc. then eventually stopped thinking and failed to boot. This happens every time i try to boot the disc. So does anyone know if there is a way i can fix this? Please, if anyone can aswer this you would definitly be put on my christmas card list. You would also save me a lot of frustrating trouble.

Have you tried the cd with another machine? Are you sure it's not broken?

All little more info might help. How much hard disk space do you have to work with? Did you reformat the partition before trying to reinslall? If not, you may have the disk space tied up with remnants of previous installs. How much ram do you have? Is it enough to satisfy the recommended ram for the distro you're installing?

Incompatible hardware had been an issue with Mandrake back in the "good old days" (which version 7.1 definitely qualifies for.) Solutions were difficult if you couldn't even get the installer into text mode.

Try a more recent version (Mandrake is up to 9.1 mow).

ya i've already gone trew all this already. 9.1 is the one i put on before, not enough mem. 32mb ram (not enough for 9.1)

it's a bought version of 7.1 , my friend used it, he keeps really good care of his discs.

2gig hard drive

if i were to try it with another machine my father would kill me because he is over protective about it. I can't even use my own computer because it doesn't have any os that works right now so i'm using my dads.

no there is no other data from other installs because i format every time i tried to install.

Do you get any error message? Try pressing ctrl+alt+F?, there's log somewhere (ctrl+alt+F2?)

um, i tried the ctrl alt f and f2 thing but nothing happened.
no errors show up or anything. it's just the fact that it won't boot.

You may want to look into a slimmer distribution such as Slackware or Debian. Mandrake's installer may be too feature-laden to cooperate with 32MB RAM, but I've successfully installed the latest Slackware with only 4MB RAM.