Please help
 

Okay,

The machine specs are

Abit kt7
850 Athlon
512 ram
Linksys lne 100
Netgear fa311
Wd 10 gig
IO magic Soundcard

Attempting to install Mandrake 9.0

I had XP pro on the drive, went to fdisk and del the partition, and made a new one. The partition is now blank. Pop in Mandrake 9 disk and it auto boots. Does some stuff gets to
Partition check:
hda:spurious 8259A interrupt : irq7
wtf does that mean?

Usually, this error isn't anything to worry about, unless your system then freezes, or you see the error multiple times.
What device is using IRQ7? My guess would be an unused device, such as a network card not connected to a network. If you can get into Linux (or XP, if you still had it installed (never wipe out a working OS! ;) ), you could tell easily what device used which IRQ, but you may be able to see this in the BIOS device printout when your system boots.
If you can get into Linux, you could try:
cat /proc/pci | grep 'IRQ 7'

Re: Please help
 

BTW, could have something to do with two unconfigured NIC cards in your machine, as I take these two items are most likely network cards?

mmm it was the hd
i swapped it for another hd and it worked

But the hd that gave the error was a working hd?

hmmm
 

could have possibly a bad boot sector.

it is freezing on that hd still
how do i repair a bad boot sector?