Hi

I have been using Mandrake 10.1 community and before that 9.2 and 10.0 and now I have upgraded to 10.1 official and here are the problems that I have been facing:

1- Sometimes I recieve :
"hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x24"
for a long time and it does nothing else. After I reboot a couple of times, finally it works.
Now, when the linux boots, it does not recognise my mouse. So I should be using keyboard at all times. I tried to change the hardware configuration to "generic 3 button mouse". Then I restarted the computer and it again failed to boot.
So, I am not sure what to do now with these issues.

2- When I was trying to install Linux 10.1 official, it asked for 4 CDs while I had only 3. I don't know where to find the 4th one, so if anybody knows, please let me know.

Thanks

My Mandrake 10.1 Official has four CD's. I would get a fresh set and start over with a clean install. You can buy them from Mandrake or third party vendors. (You can also D/L them but I like to support the distro)

I doubt the fourth CD has anything to do with your boot problems. One can make a decent bootable system with the first CD.

Was your system behaving properly with the earlier Linux distros? Perhaps you have a problem with hardware.

Can you list your hardware features: CPU, speed, RAM, hard drives, motherboard? It might give someone a clue.

On some systems, you can turn off dma at boot with linux nodma at the boot prompt. Are you suing grub or lilo? It is faster to operate with DMA but it may help to avoid it until you debug your system. If you can boot in, take a look at /var/log/messages to see if there is any more useful information about the boot up or the hard drives.

I didnt have the fourth CD either, but I'm not having those kind of problems.

Thank you for your replies. I didn't want CD 4 to resolve the issues I have been facing with.
I have had no problems with Mandrake 10.1 community edition, Red Hat 9.0 so far.
the system specs you asked for:

HP Pavilion a220n

AMD Athlon XP 2600+ ( 2.08 GHz )
512 MB DDR RAM
120 GB Samsung SV1204H UDMA Hdd 5400 rpm
Motherboard: ASUS A7N8X-LA

Hope somebody can help

The key is that the installer ASKED for the fourth CD. My assumption is that the CD contains something needed to run the hardware he has.

I doubt it.. it's more like just a case of trying to install some software which is available on the fourth CD, all of which is optional and should not interfere with getting a good basic system up and running...

I too had *lots* of problems with Mandrake 10.1, and i had access to the 'fourth CD', too! in the end, i went back to 10.0, which was a bit of a shame because 10.1 did look kind of promising...

The 4th CD only has some "extras" that are not needed for an install. Everything on CD#4 is available in the "contrib" mirrors using urpmi.

As to your problems ... I dunno.

Mandrake 10.1 has been rock-solid for me.