To make a long story short, I ended up wasting the CDs I had to scrounge up for 9.2 for AMD64. See below for the long story.

Now, like any self-respecting person who used up too many CDs, I have a DVD burner and a DVD-RW that I'd more than happily like to use in creating a bootable DVD to install this.

I've read a bunch of things on it but none of them are for Mandrake and Windows. I don't have access to a PC running Linux, because at one point or another, Mandrake would no longer boot. I'm hoping I'll have more luck 1) reinstalling from scratch 2) with a newer version.


Long story:
As an aside (albeit a big one), while Mandrake boots up and, it seems to be random, but if I pushed a key on the keyboard too soon, it'd crash with an error about unable to handle kernel paging request. The same thing would happen on the CD install floppy images with Mandrake (32-bit) when I pushed enter to select which drive. After various screwing with XFree86 to get my sound card to work, I kept consistently getting this error soon before XFree86 finished initializing (before KDE started) started. The installer for AMD64 also would do this up until it asked me to create a password and new account. I can't figure this out. Windows (yes, yes, I know) is perfectly stable so that rules out hardware.

Note that, while it may seem like so from the above, I'm not anti-Linux. I want to get the thing running so I can try it out. I spent a week just trying to install XMMS to find that I get no sound and just before I was about to bite the bullet and compile/install DRI (because my ATI card is stuck in 800x600), I find that the install was completely screwed.