my windows harddrive recently died, and i tried installing a harddrive with white box on it that a friend gave me. well it had problems with kernal panic so i installed mandrake over it. well it kept trying to load up white box. now no matter what hardrive i try to run it loads up white box. even when that harddrive (which no longer has white box on it) is not in the box. what's going on and what can i do to fix it. i really want to have a computer again.

Your talking about White Box Linux right?
And Mandrakes bootloader recognises white box being there right?
Then have you fully deleted the partition, White Box in on, with fdisk?

Or does it loads the White box boot loader instead of Madrake?

Don't worry if you don't know what or how to partition.
Don't worry if you haven't herd of fdisk.

Mandrake make it real easy for you just choose to partition.
Delete every thing. Then reboot with the Mandrake CD inside
and choose the Auto partition option.

see that's the thing, i did that. it loads the whitebox boot loader when that drive isn't even in.

So you must have the Whitebox bootdisk in the Floppy,
or one of your CDRom ( or CD-RW) drives.

i don't.

When you tried to install Mandrake do you remember anything about being asked about installing a boot loader? Did you do that? If you did can you remember it you installed it to the MBR (Master boot record)?

I would think about re-installing it and making sure that you install the bootloader (I think mandrake uses lilo) to the MBR.

Before you do that, if you want to be extra paranoid about it you can take a windows 98 boot disk (you can get one from bootdisk.com) and run the command "fdisk /mbr" That will remove the whitebox bootloader.