I was given a Compaq Prosignia computer that the previous user had seriously messed up, he had problems with it so he reformatted the hard drive and was going to reinstall windows, now I got it and tried to install Mandrake 9.2 it made it so far and the I got the "hdlists not found" error. After that it would not recognize the CD-ROM drive, I went to the OEM website and tried to install the patch but now I can even get the thing to boot off the hard drive to get to a prompt. So I guess my question is, is there a way to boot the system to fix the CD-ROM drive so I can try to install Mandrake again?

And how do I do the md5sum or whatever it is to make sure my download is right.

md5sum <file_name.iso>

Compare the output hex number with the md5sum file on the download site. A windows version is available if needec. Just google.