Hello...you have a noob here...winblows it guy trying to make the change to linux...I had successfully installed Suse 9.3 on my sata 120...but wanted to go with Mandriva 2006...so I installed over by erasing existing...no errors during install--seamless!...until reboot... I get error 17 and all stops...I tried reinstalling again...same thing...

I have seen other threads regarding this 'error 17' but I just don't get it...can someone help me fix this easily?

thanks in advance

I'm guessing you have a problem with the Grub bootloader. There are two main types of bootloader in Linux, Lilo and Grub. SUSE uses Grub by default where as Mandriva uses Lilo unless you specify otherwise.

It sounds like the Grub bootloader has been left behind from your old installation and Mandriva has either not installed itself to the MBR properly or has used the original Grub configuration instead of the new one.

Unless you did this before, but re-install wiping the entire drive and make sure (double and tripple check) that Lilo installs itself to the MBR.

Thanks!...reinstalled--wiped disk...all is well

thanks!