Sorry too late...lol I went during my lunch break and bought a Sony DVD +-r/rw drive. I was in need of one anyway and my gift card just came in from Best Buy for when I bought my TV a few months back. The tray on the current drive is funky sometimes. And the sensor to detect whether a cd is present is wacked. I have had it for close to 5 years so i can't complain too much. I will post in a few hours when I get off of work and have a chance to install it.

Laters

Adding to the question.... does directCD software for windows work to burn the boot cd for a mandrake 10 install? has anyone tried it?

Not really sure. I never tried it I just got the 14 day trial of Nero for free and it burned them fine.

Well, just tested the new drive and no luck. I am wondering if having Lilo still in the MBR is thowing the boot off. Maybe I can get 8.2 up and going and see if I can install from there. Good luck to anyone else having this issue. Please post if you have a solution or comments and thanks to everyone that has posted. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Firstly, the directcd software won't work to burn any iso images. 'coz it wud treat the isos as just another file. That is why extreme precaution needs to be undertaken before burning iso images on to the cd. The softwrae needs to be told that you are burning an image and so treat it accordingly.

Seraph buddy, tough luck. The only way to remove lilo from the mbr is through the windows boot floppy. But your floppy drive dosen't work. So...

But the lilo can't be responsible for this. 'Coz it reads the cd much before it accesses the mbr.

Try booting from disc 2 on Mandrake 10. I've read about several people not being able to get disc one to boot. It won't in 2 out of 3 pcs at my place. But all 3 boot disc 2 no prob, and then you swap when prompted

Those are some excellent stats...lol 2 out of 3 can't run disc 1. It wouldn't surprise me since I have tried 4 drives and only one of them worked but it was on my work machine. I am looking at other distros right now, but will try the disc2 idea when I get off from work.

I was reading this thread with interest and I wanted to share what happened for me.
I downloaded the 3 ISO's and the 80 min CD's I burned them on weren't that good I guess because 1 kept failing. I reburned 1 on a CD-RW from Staples and that worked but not after some hassle.
The CD kept failing and failing and this machine would have a problem etc. I finally created the floppy and in combination with the floppy and the new CD it finally worked. I am writing this from my Konqueror web browser. The thing I kept doing was retrying the same floppy or CD again and again and finally it worked.
My suggestion is to get some good CD's to burn to and make them a CD-RW so you can reuse if it fails.
Good Luck,
Dan
PS I redownloaded the 1 Cd and that was the one I burned to the new 80 min CD-RW.

Rylinkus...Thanks so much. Your suggestion about disc 2 solved the problem. I actually thought about trying that at one time and didn't think that it would work. I was at my wits end with the install and started looking for other distros to install. The new Kernel and KDE rock and I can use my mouse wheel now...YAY!!!11

Wow. Good to know that you got it working.

Cheers.

Thanks to everyone that contributed. You guys are great!!!!!

Good luck with OSS.

Cheers.

I was wondering, did you change your bios, so that the CDROM would be the first item to boot up? If not, you will never see the cd platter come up. More than likely your OS is looking for something in the hard-drive first, instead.

Well, had you read the very first post in this thread,it clearly says that the floppy drive doesn't work so the BIOS is set up to boot from the cd first.

Also, one of the posts said that he was able to boot 8.2 with ease.

So are there isos for version 10? I can't find them anywhere. The folder structure on every nirror I go to looks the same and nowhere can I find ISOS!! Help