I hope someone can help me with this problem. I have a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop (P4 2.66, 768 RAM, 32MB GeForce2Go video card, DVD/CDRW combo drive), onto which I have just installed Mandrake 10.1. I'm having an issue with booting into the OS itself. I come to the bootloader screen and select 'linux' (Choices are linux, linux-nonfb, and failsafe). The blue 'loading' screen appears, then the system hangs and never boots into the OS. This is the case when also choosing nonfb. On choosing failsafe, I get as far as hdc: max request size: 1024KiB. Then it repeats "hdc: lost interrupt"
I have Mandrake 10.1 running on my desktop with no issues, and have had Fedora Core 3 installed on this laptop in the past. Of the two OS's I prefer Mandrake and was hoping to install it on this laptop. Could anyone give me advice?

Thanks!

(By the way, I am a PC hardware technician by trade, and finishing a degree in computer programming, so don't hold back on technical or complicated advice)

two question's instead of an answer: is your OS really on hdc (second master) and also - do you eventually have 2 hd-drives? if yes, the problem may be a DMA/UDMA pair...and that's really not the best situation.

1. Yes, the OS is on hdc - I reinstalled yesterday to make sure
2. No, I only have the single 30Gb hard drive in the laptop. I chose to let Mandrake set up the partitions automatically (which is what I did for the desktop as well). I am unable to boot to text or GUI, so I can't check the partitions out to see if something is amiss there. BTW - correction on my original entry - booting to nonfb produces the same results as failsafe.

I did have FC3 installed on this machine, but had issues with sound, in user or root mode, but that is a separate issue. I'm just curious why Mandrake is giving me such fits on this one. It's not a big deal if I can't get it to work out. I have a SuSE 9 live CD that works well on this machine, and am thinking about downloading & burning the full installation ISO to give it a try.

But, being the die-hard technician that I am, I am willing to fight to the last round to get Mandrake to work. I won't give up until I'm absolutely sure that it won't work on this machine

This one had me just about ready to throw in the towel on Linux. But, I decided to give SUSE 9 a try and, lo and behold, it works flawlessly. I am going to put Mandriva 2006 on the desktop PC, though. At least I know it will work without issues on that one.