driving me nuts!!!
 

I installed Mandrake 9.2. All went well............until it asked for a username/password. NO matter what I use.."INVALID" I contacted Mandrake, they said "Delete the partion and reinstall" OK. How the hell do I do that??? It partioned off some of the NTFS drive for Mandrake, and I am using windows 2000 pro, so I have no way of running any of these fdisk programs that work on 98. Right now mandrake is installed--twice, but is unusable.

Any suggestions?

Can't start the installation booting from the CD's ????

You don't have to delete the partition, simply start off the 1st CD, select the partition used before as destination and when ask you to initialize or format that (linux) partition, say yes. Read carefully the installation questions... say no if it ask you to repair, fix or upgrade that installation. It must be a fresh one. But it's not necessary to delete the partition.

You can make a DOS boot disk (even with Win2k) and copy inside it FreeDISK. It will run in DOS mode and you can see your Linux partition (even delete it, but I don't recommend this way). I recommend that you use Mandrake installation utilities for partitioning and format, they might be easier for you. In a extreme case, you might find a copy of $Partition Magic$ that you can use in Win2K. There you can easily work with your partitions.

Tried that...re installed..again.. came to boot up..asked for user/pass. "INVALID" and here we go again!!! And I though Windows was bad

Don't blame Linux. Somewhere during the install its going to ask you to create a root password.

You will then use username of 'root' and the 'password' you typed in to login initially.

Is that what your doing? Are you even creating a root password or any other users during the install?

I guess the installation is asking you for a password to the "root" user. Maybe not all passwords are valid, it has to have a minimum length and / or some non-alphanumeric characters in. It said just "INVALID" ???

Are you installing it on a laptop? I ask because I had a similar problem when I installed Mandrake (9.1), and the answer turned out to be so dumb I'm embarrassed to tell..... there is a daemon that was turning the number lock on at startup. On my laptop the numeric keys are in the main keyboard. You probably see the problem. Do check that, if you haven't already!