Im trying to install Mandrake 10 on my:

Athlon 3200+
10gb partition
ATAPI cd drive

I have no FDD in this machine, or any machine :P

It boots fine for XP, etc. But after burning off the rar files onto disks.. it doesnt detect that the cd inserted has bootable material on it...

Any ideas?

http://linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/howtoburn.html may come in handy. Grab the isos, burn them to disk and boot from them.

And welcome to LQ

You cannot boot from compressed files such as rar or zip. The contents of the rar files need to be extracted and then burned to disks or download the ISO's. Download ISO's from here: http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3
At bottom of that page choose "I'm already a member of the Club or plan on registering soon, please send me to the download page" and choose "Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official ISOs/i586 " on that page. When downloads are complete you will have ISO images on your hard drive, just double click on those to have a program like Nero or such burn them.

Alternatively, if you had already burned the contents or the rar's to disk, and not the rar's themselves, then maybe you have the beta version called Mandrake 10.0 Community (not official) as there was some issue of them not booting off the first cd and needing to be booted up using cd#2 or something like that.

:hehe: oops.

Im using the community ones

and they were burnt correctly. the load in windows as they should... they just dont work so well booting from cd... but you've just told me why. Back to the downloading...

Thnx Xavier