Booted Mandriva One livecd with no problem. Installed Mandriva on an external USB hard drive (not pen/flash drive, but actual hard drive), selected GRUB as boot manager, instructed BIOS to boot from USB drive.

Rebooted. GRUB appeared & all seemed to be going well.

Got to the blue screen with the penguin and a status bar at the lower-left. Nothing. Waited awhile. Still nothing. No drive activity, nothing. Kept waiting. Still nothing. Tried ctrl-alt-delete, pressing random keys, power button. Nothing worked.

I've searched the net for accounts of a similar problem, but haven't found anything yet. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

a first stab in the dark try the kernel parameters
video=vesa napic nolapic noacpi
(to do that press e for edit when you have grub loaded and selected first line)

Thanks so much for responding. I tried what you suggested; no luck, but a ton of error messages, most of them prefixed with either hde or ide. Typical messages were hde: lost initrd, ide: failed opcode was: unknown, hde: DMA intr: bad DMA status. Since I've seen "hde" refer to my internal NTFS harddrive, could it be that linux is attempting to mount this drive during the boot process? Also, I do have an NTFS partition on the external drive -- could it be attempting to mount this?

I also tried the original boot again -- this time, hitting either ctrl-c or ctrl-alt-delete (not sure which triggered it) also produced a log containing error messages. The messages appeared after the line "creating root device". I wasn't able to jot them all down, but some of them were:

mount: error 6 mounting ext3 flags notime
switch to new root
ERROR opening dev/console
switch root: mount failed
Kernel panic!!! (followed by something else I didn't catch)

As for linux partitions, I have 3, all of which were created automatically by the Mandriva install. A small partition (boot, I presume), followed by a very small "swap" partition, followed by a large partition (root, I presume). Grub is installed on the first linux partition.

The GRUB commands for booting linux read:
kernel (hd0,5)/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda8 splash=silent vga=788
initrd (hd0,5)/initrd.img

(sda8 is the name of the large linux partition)

Whatever the problem is, I get the impression it has largely to do with booting from the external USB drive. I can boot a linux liveCD (e.g. puppy linux) and navigate the linux partitions without difficulty, and the Mandriva live install CD works just fine . . .

Thank you again for your help.

This thread seems relevant -- and if it is, the issues involved are way above this n00b's head!

forum.club.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?p=165550&sid=46582df983c149416d2b9d7b304d9ac0

(sorry, the forum software won't let me post a normal link since I'm new here).

I've found some solutions posted around the net for other distros. Most of them have to do with loading usb support before attempting to mount the root directory (makes sense, at least in the abstract), but I'm not sure how applicable these solutions are to Mandriva. I really liked live livecd version of Mandriva, but I think it may be time to try one of those other distros.

congrats on your searches and posting so much info.
This is good
This looks wrong
I tell you why: hd0 is the first HD, so presumably your ata drive.
5 is partition 6, (grubs counts form 0)
so never in a lifetime this is going to be sda8
(sd is a usb or sata drive partition no 89 (

sda8 refers to you usb drive

when grub appears edit the lines so it looks like
kernel (hd1,7)/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda8 splash=silent vga=788 video=vesa napic nolapic noacpi
initrd (hd1,7)/initrd.img

How many HD have you got?