I just install Mandrake 9.2 on a Dell GX200 with 256mb of ram. It is the only OS on the box. The installation went smoothly. I am using a nVidia TNT2 16mb PCI graphics card and not the onboard video.

When booting, Mandrake hangs on Building Window Manager Sessions. At that point, nothing works. I have to hit the power switch.

Any ideas why this is happening?

I'm a newbie too, but I'll take a shot at it anyway. Remember during the installation, when you were asked to select the name of the video card you're using? Did you click on "test" (or something, can't remember exactly)? Did it display the test screen OK? If you never tested it, try reinstalling Mandrake 9.2 and this time be sure to experiment. If your card isn't listed just try similar cards and do a test each time. When I installed Mandrake, the first option that it chose turned out to be no good, so I had to select another driver. Good luck.

I'll try that!

I have same problem, actually. During install, I DID test the graphics driver, it tested fine. Install seemed clean, no probs on all three discs. When my computer (900mhz AMD Athlon, 40GB HD (Maxtor, I think.), 512mb SDRAM, NVidea GeForce4 MX440 GFX) boots, it gets past the BIOS inits and tries to boot from devices...nothing on the hard drive boots, and only the Mandrake disc will boot. I've tried a bootable Win95 disc - nothing doing. The error it gives is odd, it prints out a string of '9's and spaces (i.e. 99 99 99999 99 9) for a few lines, and then totally hangs. I told the boot loader during configuration to boot from the first sector of the boot partition (which I did create), should I have changed that?

I made the mistake of wiping my entire HD, so i no longer even have a windows partition to boot into. When I enter rescue menu from Disc1, it lets me enter a console, but I'm not familiar enough with it to do squat. Total newb here. Help?

EDIT: By the way, this is Mandrake 9.2, I got the ISOs from random server. The first two times I installed it, it went all the way to the boot manager. If I tried to boot normally, it would run all the initial crap fine, but then my first monitor (I have two, and was using one) would go dead, and the second would display five or so lines of info about the GFX card. I got tired of that, and pulled the extras from my Mobo (second GFX card and NIC, left out all USB devices), and re-installed. Twice. Same error (as described in initial post) after both installs. I'm worried I've seriously fisted my HD, Mobo, DVD-ROM (LG, but it works witht he install discs even after instaling Linus, so...), or all three. :\

I don't think you made any damage to your hardware, but I pressume your cd's were burnt incorrectly. Once you download you should always check their MD5 sums before burning.

I've checked the md5sums, they're good. Identical strings. As I said, it gave all appearances of clean install the first two times. I'm not sure what I've done differently. I'm about to try for the 5th (sixth? I forget.) install.

My biggest beef right now is that it doesn't let my computer boot from any CD except the Mandrake discs (admittedly, I've only tried Win95, but I really do not have a lot of bootable CDs lying around.) My flopppy drive has been dead for months, so I can't test that. If I could just get WinXP back, and set up a second partition to mess with Mandrake, I'd be good...but I can't.

Okay, what I've learned today: MandrakeMove works great on my computer. Unfortunately, upon installing a second cd-rom drive and plugging in the afore-mentioned Win95 disc, I learned Linux doesn't run exe files. Bugger. Aparantly even WINE can't h andle a full Windows install, and I sti ll can't boot from anything but burned Mandrake discs. I'm beyond puzzled. I've tried swapping the IDE cables (i.e. HDD became secondary master, CD-drives became primaries), didn't affect anything. My Maxtor boot disc does nothing. I can't copy the Win95 disc to my windows partition in MandrakeMove because I don't have permission, and it won't allow me to login as root. I'm not even sure if doing that would help, as I'm doubting the computer would let me boot from that kind of arrangement.

Again, I turn on my computer with no Mandrake disc. It runs through the BIOS stuff, lists all drives ok, quickchecks RAM ok, shows ports, then says "unknown flash type" , newline, "L 99 99 99 99 99....." for about 7 lines tall.

Running out of ways to fix - I don't have the resources to copy a good HDD onto my HDD.