Aaarggh
 

Today I finally decided to go through with creating a dual boot system by installing Mandrake 9.1 on my Windows XP PC.

I downloaded the first 2 isos and burned them onto CD-RWs; I noticed that the second disk was a little scratched but thought nothing of it at the time.

I then used Partition Magic to create a Linux partition on my hard drive and a swapfile. I then proceeded to put the boot CD into my disk drawer and rebooted.

Everything went as expected, and I began installing packages. When it came time to install the second CD, it began to lock up so I decided to cancel, figuring that I could download these "optional" packages later. What then happened was very strange: The installation program skipped the "add user" and "pick a root password" steps, and went straight to installing the bootloader and configuring everything.

This caused me some consternation, but I went through with it. When I got to the initial starting Linux GUI, I was asked for a username and password, but, as you have probably inferred, I had none to give. I tried putting nothing for a password, but the GUI rejected it with that cute shaking motion.

So I rebooted, and tried again; only this time I installed only the bare minimum of required packages so I didn't even have to deal with disk 2. Same thing happened.

Then, using a bootable floppy with fdisk, I switched my active partition to the windows one and tried to start up windows (in the hopes of searching for solutions online). What I instead got was an "L" followed by a string of "99"s.

I have no idea what to do now and would greatly appreciate any help.

Thanks

The only thing I can think of (but you did get through the entire install... odd) is that maybe your CDRW was only 650mb and you need 700mb CD's to burn this.

Also, during the install you should be able to click back to sections you've passed, you should try to click back to the section where you create users.

:)

Cool