I tried installing Mandriva 2005 and....
 

HELP!!!! I tried to install mandriva 2005 and nothing happened. I formated and created a linux partition on my hard drive. I changed the bootup cycle and set the cdrom to boot first. I boot to the cd and the first screen came up that said press enter to install or upgrade or F1 for more options. Ether choice goes to an infanite black screen. If I push nothing it goes to the blackscreen in thirty seconds. The hard drive doesn't spin, neither does the cdrom. It doesn't light up and I don't hear my processer crunching. My Windows XP cd will boot and I have loaded red hat 7 and 9 on the computer before with no problem. Has this happend to anyone else? Does anyone know what this might be?

Athlon XP 2000
512 RAM
120 gig hd

Where did you get your cd's from they may have been burned wrong or damaged. You said redhat 7 and 9 installed fine so my first guess would be either bad media (CD) or bad iso images try burnig the iso images again at a slower speed and check the md5 checksum on your iso images.

If you can get your hands on a copy of Knoppix and run that with no problems then that should eliminate most if not all questions about hardware compatibility etc etc

Knoppix is a live CD which will run off the CD without installing onto your hard drive - its very useful.

If you can do that successfully then I would strongly suspect that your CDs are at fault somehow. How did you obtain them, did you buy them or did your burn your own. one tip for burning CDs is to burn them at the lowest speed - yes it takes longer but you'll lessen your chances of copy errors.

floppy