Am trying to get Mandrake 10 to work on my WinXP machine (dual boot). I have tried to download the ISOs via Bittorrent, but all I get is a blank screen ('Community Powerpack');
I tried via ftp, but that didn't work either. What could I be doing wrong?
It is an AMD Athlon XP2600+, 512MB DDR to 2048MB max, nVIDIA geforce-
fx5200 (128MB DDR). Motherboard is nVIDIA M7NCD (North Bridge: nVIDIA
nFORCE2 400, South Bridge, nVIDIA nFORCE2 MCP/MCP-T, if all of this is
any help. Also, the monitor is an Amptron TFT LCD L17A series. I saved to
C: (drive) then burned to cd with (Nero Express).
Appreciate any help from anyone who has had similar problems/issues with
Windows/Linux installations.
Thanks!

Well the problem is probably the nVidia driver. I have Mandrake 9.2 PowerPack and on initial install I also got a black screen once X was loaded, the bootsplash worked just fine. Mandrake detects that your video card is a nVidia card, and therefore attempts to use the nVidia driver, however it does not seem to work. I simply went in and modified the XFree86-4.conf file to not use the nVidia driver, it uses the standard "nv" driver. This is obviously not ideal, but I have tried many things, posted threads on LinuxQuestions.org for help and even XFree86.org's forum for help but no one seems to be able to help me. So if you want KDE, Gnome, or whatever to work, modify your XFree86-4.conf file. If you figure out how to get the nVidia driver to work, let me know.

When is the screen going blank, during install, or when it's installed and your booting into the gui.

You should have a look at :
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin...ain/Mandrake10

Because your problem looks like :

Problem: PowerPack installations when an nvidia video card is present cards do not start X on reboot
Solution: Run 'depmod -a' as root after reboot or reinstall the nvidia drivers that match your kernel in the nvidia folder of cd3. Or install latest driver (5336) from nvidia website with the appropriate kernel-source.

Best regards.

If you get a blank screen right after the boot selection, it might be a bios pnp problem.

To check this, try selecting the option that looks like "failsafe", "text-mode" or something like that.

If it instantly gives a Oops, then it most certanly is a buggy BIOS.
You can go around it by setting "pnpbios=off" in lilo.conf and reinstalling the bootloader (I can give more detailed instructions on how to do this, after you test that this is the actual problem).

hank@$3800,

I have a P4 2.53 GHz with NVIDIA GeForce 5600 FX 8X AGP and loaded Mandrake 10 (dual boot with XP) runs perfectly. Dell 2000FP LCD - 1600 x 14000. I had a similar problem, during the install I set the Security Level to Higher (or something to that effect) and I would just get a blank screen.

Reinstalled the software with Standard Security and it worked...