The installation hangs at the following screen.

A lot of text there, I'll just type the most relevant stuff. Spelling might not be 100% accurate, as I wrote down the info very quickly and some of my handwriting can no longer be decrypted =)

memory 509388k.....
Dentry cache hash table entry: 65536 (order: 7,524288 bytes)
Intel machine check enabled on cpu#0
.....
AMD Athlon (tm) XP 2000+ stepping 02
...
ESR value before enabling Vector: 0000 0000
ESR value after enabling Vector: 0000 0000
...
??using?? (not sure what I wrote) local APIC timer interrupts
CPU clock speed is 1667 mhz
Host BUS clock speed is 0,0000 mhz
cpu:0 clocks:0 , slice:0
_

The cursor blinks, but does not spin
hard drive LED is not working

I chose the Install with safe settings options.

Resolution is text mode.
If I choose any other resolution, the screen goes blank, the Hard Drive LED do not work either. My monitor is a Viewsonic A70-2, which is probably not supported. A friend once tried to install suse 9.0 on his comp, which had a Viewsonic e90F I think, and the screen also went blank, or maybe got a frequenccy out of range error. If you replaced the monitor during the install, you could see things properly.

So I try Text mode, with native or verbose, but all I got was the screen described above.

My hard drive used to have 1 NTFS partition of 40 GB, but I used partition magic to resize it, so that now there is 1 partition of around 37.5 GB (NTFS) and an unpartitioned space of around 2.5 GB. The resized ntfs partition works fine by the way.

Thanks for any help.

Can you install linux on an NTFS formatted partition? I thought it had to be FAT.

I resized my only partition, the ntfs windows XP 40 GB partition into a 37.5 GB ntfs partition with partition magic, leaving 2.5 GB of unpartitioned space, which I am planning to use to install linux, but never got that far in the installation setup.

2.5GB is not really going to be enough for linux unless you go console only (no kde or gnome/no destop manager/no gui), and you are going to lose another gig to create a (necessary) 1GB swap partition for linux (unlike windows who create the swap file inside the main partition, linux requires a dedicated partition for swap).... that only leaves a 1.5 gig for linux and any apps you want to run.... I would suggest freeing more like 5 or 6 if you want to install a fully graphical system

also... how did you plan on handling the bootloader?

I do not know what is the bootloader.

This is my 1st linux install, and I'm planning to test how fast Linux is by installing opera, mplayer, acrobat reader, gqviewer. If everything goes well I'll resize everything and reinstall with 5-6 GB allowed to Linux.

So for this install , I'm planning for 512-800 MB swap file, 1 GB for the kernel + install files, that would leave me 700-1 GB for the rest. I'll probably check the movies direct from the CD or DVD drive.

My friend's Suse install is around 500 MB, he doesnt have Kde or Gnome, so I figured 1 GB should be enough if I added Kde.

how do you plan on booting into linux? during the install, linux will install what is called a boot loader, or a program that launches your operating system of choice. you will need to configure the bootloader to recognize windows, or else you will only be able to boot into linux.

do you know how to reinstall the windows boot loader? If not, Id research that before doing your install, or you will not be able to get into windows again.