I installed Mandrake 9.2 on a partition of my hard drive with XP on the other half. After installation has completed, the system rebooted and Linux was initializing until it hit "Bringing up interface eth0.....[FAILED]." It then stopped at "Starting ALSA 0.9.6" and never continued.

In other words, my Linux does not boot. One more thing to mention, when I first start my computer (which is a laptop) I have the following menu:
Linux
Failsafe
Windows
Floppy

Please advise since I repeated the installation process around 10 times by now.

Thanks you in advanced.

when you were almost done with installing, you should be prompted with a page of things it had done, I think summary is it. There should be things like:

Lan
security
software

etc.. with "configure" next to it. Configure your LAn settings and your sound drivers, as well as everything else to make sure it all works.

Well,

My laptop has 30 gigs of hard drive with about 15 gig for windows. When I installed Mandrake I put
800 MB for "/"
800 MB for "Swap" knowing that I have only 256 Physical Memory
4 Gigs (approximately) for "/usr"
4.5 gigs (approximately) for "/home"
4.5 gigs (approximately) for "/var"

I configured all of the LAN, the screen, the time zone, user account, security password and checked all the software packages with ftp and mail servers (in some of installation trials!) I choose the MBR to install the bootloader at.

Now the problem is after I finish all the above, I press the "Reboot" button. The computer restarts and goes thru all the steps. Though, it fails in bringing up "eth0" and stands still at "Starting ALSA 0.9.6:"

I don't know if this is a usual error but I'm starting over the installation procedure from scratch every time this thing happens. However, I remember at one time while I was doing the configuration at the summary page, a pop-up message appeared stating that some of the methods (they looked like a C/C++ methods to me??) could not be found in "/usr." I don't remember exactly what the messages where, but they might ring a bell to any of you guys.

Please guys help me out. I don't want to go back to Microsoft and admit that they had the most friendly OS because I am not even convinced with that.

Thanks a lot.

Have you tried just making a swap and / and installing everything on that to seeing if you still get that /usr error?

yeah, for your first install, jus try "/" and swap. As for your ethernet card, it might not be supported and you should try the generic ethernet drivers (called tulip in debian), and it seems your sound card isn't supported either, You might have to compile support for these drivers into your kernel first.

I want to upgrade my Mandrake 9.1 to 9.2. I have the disks. Can I upgrade without losing any of my files and programs? Any help would be much appreciated.

PS: I did a search and didn't find much.

I'm still a newbie, and probably not very sure, but I think it keeps your old files since it gives you the choice to upgrade vs to install 9.2 as well as the choice to keep your old partitions.

Let's see what the guys would say

Just do not format any partitions and choose the "upgrade" option. Should be very simple.

Worked fine for me

Update: I attempted to install the upgrade and had "missing something or other" warnings. The install froze and I had to reboot. The #1 iso is still in my cd-rom and I don't think it works anymore. Coincidence? Hey, probably. This computer is several years old. Anyone have a suggestion for a replacement (cd-rom that is)?