Mandrake 10.1 Install problem
 

i downloaded mandrake 10.1, and booted to the cd. it starts checkinf for stuff, such as the mouse and all that. then it comed up saying no cd-rom drivers. i dont know exactly what to do... theres no floppy drive or anything, so i cant put them on a floppy.

I havn't used Mandrake, but I can tell you that if you go to the Mandrake site, you can probably find info on this.

Not sure, but most cdroms since around 1997 have been atapi-based, and should work just fine. However, if it's an older system, or you scavenged up the drive, it might be an older, proprietary drive that might need extra drivers or isn't supported by linux. If the drive is less than a 4x speed drive, or especially if it's 2x or slower, I'd put money on it. At this point, I'd see if I knew anybody with a better cdrom, as loading all that date with a slow drive would take a long, long time, and even a 32x drive is pretty much considered obsolete today (which means you should get someone to give you it for free). Just make sure you plug the new drive into the ide connectors, as the old drive is likely to go to an add-on card, which won't work, and may damage the drive/system.

Now, if it's not an older system or drive, and I don't think it is (as it wouldn't have booted to the point it did, you might have to use the "help" options when mandrake 10.1 boots. There are boot options in there that aren't set by default, because they might interfere with most systems, but because yours doesn't work, they might be worth a try. Alternatively, try booting with Knoppix, as it has a larger number of boot options, or Mepis, because it includes more proprietary drivers than most other distributions. It might just be a problem that the disk didn't burn correctly, or even that the drive isn't aligned correctly, and is erroring out when things go haywire. As before, it wouldn't hurt to try another drive, if you have the option. And naturally, if you have another OS on the computer, check and see what drivers it's using, or what hardware it sees, for more clues.

Hope this helps guide you a little closer to a solution.

Most probably it seems that image or the CD itself is corrupted.

Have you verfied the images md5 against one listed on the website, also after burning the images make sure that you verify data option enabled.

So check md5sum of image as well as CD