Howdy fellas.. I'm new to Linux in general, been into computers for quite a long time, just never took plunge into Linux until now.. Anyways this post is really for anyone trying a new installation and is a newbie like me, I ran into this problem installing Mandrake 10 (Community Download Version) last night and found my fix for it, hoping this post will help any other newbies and keep them from getting frustrated and giving up on the Linux OS before they get it installed.

When Mandrake 10 booted from cd it scanned scsi and usb adapters in the text based window (i'm a newbie still, sorry if i dont know the correct names for the linux stuff yet any vets are welcome to correct me) then it would sit at the black screen and hang. I Alt+F4 over and it gave the following error codes (from what I had wrote down, not exact text copy):

ATAPI Reset Complete

cmd 0x5A Timed Out

IRQ Time Out: Status=0x51 {DriveReady Seek Complete Error}

error 0x54 Aborted Command LastFailedSense 0x05

and this would just loop over and over until I cycled the power on the machine.

Turns out, for no apparent reason on my part, I had my hard drive on Primary Master, while my ATAPI CD Rom was Seconday Slave. I went through the bios and reset configuration data and put ATAPI Performance on Enhanced and that didn't seem to fix it. I powered computer down and changed the ATAPI CD Rom from Secondary Slave to Secondary Master then powered computer back on and Mandrake 10 Installation took off installing with no more errors.

I'm assuming there is an issue possibly with mandrake 10 and having atapi cdrom on slave with no master present, I'm not sure.. my mandrake 7.1 would install fine with that set up, but mandrake 10 wouldnt.

Anyways, like I said, this is really just to put the information out on the internet in hopes of solving someone else's dilemma with a linux installation.

Peace..