I could use some exerienced people to help me out. Here is my situation... I have Windows XP installed on my primary drive. I have my slave drive partioned into 2 partitions roughly 19Gb each One of those paartitions has nothing on it, thats where i'm trying to install, the other has all my mp3s and downloads on it. I select auto allocate, it starts to do its thing then gives me an error "invalid hdlist description" any thoughts. Ohh and this is my first install, figures. Thanks in advance.

You might try deleting the partition in the installer before selecting autoallocate. Are the MP3's in the first or second partition. If it is in the second parition, and it is a primary partition, perhaps the installer wants to create more then 3 partitions. There is a limit of 4 primary paritions.

Pressing '[CTRL]-[ALT]-[F2] during the installation will get you into a shell (of sorts anyway).

You could type in 'fdisk -l /dev/hdb' to look at your second ide HD. It will list the partitions and what types they are. You might want to do this when you get to the language selection part of the installation. You can use fdisk to delete the partition to begin with.

If the partition is the first on on the second ide drive, /dev/hdb, then:
fdisk /dev/hdb
d # the delete command
1 # select the partition ( count starts with 1 )
w # write the new table to the disk
q # quit the 'fdisk' program.

After this you will need to reboot.

One other thing that has caused my problems in the past is having a USB key drive inserted during the installation.

Thanks for the reply. The Mp3s would have been on the "second" part of the drive, but this is only going from the naming scheme windows uses. MP3s were on D: and I was trying to install on E: The next thing I tried is just erasing that drive all together and just installing it on that entire disk, I already had backed up my mp3s so no biggie. That still didn't work. I tried as many diff cobinations of creating the root, home and swap, through Mandrake's Interface. I will try doing fdisk through the shell. FYI: I was worried that something gotr permanently wrecked, so I tried to install Debian Sarge, I installed without a problem. So it is just something that Mandrake doesn't like apparently.