I just installed Mandrake 10.1 on 1 hard drive and tried booting up. (My WinXP on the other drive looks okay). Everything seems to work fine up to the following point: Enabling swap space - (OK). Most previous messages show (OK). The only other message that shows Fail is: Mount:/dev/sda1 is not a valid block device.
Can't seem to get to "Starting net profile" and all subsequent processes( right word?). (When it stalls, I don't see any error messages either - just a blue screen).

Help will be most appreciated. Thanks in advance.
PS: (I barely know how to Spell Linux so explain simply).

Too little information. /dev/sda1 is first partition on first SCSI drive. Assuming you have a SCSI machine, probably the stock kernel has no support for your controller.

I have an HP Pavilion 750n PC with all the original hardware except for the extra internal Maxtor hard drive (didn't think I had a SCSI drive - aren't those for Macs?). Will go home and re-check for SCSI devices.
However, I did have an external hard drive connected to the PC which can run firewire - can that be the SCSI device? (I plugged in and turned on everything I had when I booted up to ensure Linux could detect it).
(I'll try turning off the external HD and just re-booting & see what happens)
Let me know what other info you need to diagnose and I'll get it. Thanks for response.

Firewire works over SCSI, this explains the SCSI thing.
Don't know about Mandrake installation.
You may want to read documentation about dual-booting.

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

You have to understand how booting works when XP is on one HDD and Linux on another.

If I wanted to re-install Linux again, do I have to wipe out the whole drive and start from scratch or can I just put in the boot CD and just overwrite the present system? Last time I selected everything from desktop to server. Now I'm thinking to select the bare minimum and add stuff afterwards one by one........
I can start over with the existing boot CD that I have or borrow my friend's copy of Mandrake and try again (just in case there's somethng wrong with my CD).
I'll re-read the dual boot "steps" again and try re-tracing my steps to see if there is anything I missed the first time.

BTW: Dumb question: I have 5 CDs for Mandrake but only used 1 CD for the install. Are the other 4 just "accessory" programs? I feel as if I have too many spare parts left over.......been nagging me.

Thanks again for your reply and Ciao for now.

As I said before, dunno about Mandrake installation. The Debian I'm using offers partitioning and filesystem creation during setup, hence can be installed to an used HDD.
Not installing everything at once is good idea.
And don't worry about those 4 CD's. Once you have your Linux working you can discover the additional software and see if you need something from there.

Muchas gracias Emerson! Success! I unplugged my external firewire hard drive and my system successfully booted up. No problems - works like a charm....you solved it.
Much obliged. lol