i freed up some 10gigs on my harddrive,left it unalocated, tried to boot from the mandrake #1 install disk, but my pc would not load the disk, instead it went to windows. the disk was downloaded, and i burned it as an iso image. i was able to open the disk in windows and found 2 zip files, i tried to open one and the file that was extracted was not recognized by windows. i realy want to install mandrake on my system, if ne1 coyld help me i would really appreciate it.

should i just install red hat 9.1 instead?

Did you change your bios settings? You should choose your first boot device as your CD-ROM instead of your hard-drive.

Good Luck

i did that. the cd starts for about a nonosecond and then it gos to the select os screen, and there i have a choice of winXPhome and a base version of winXP home of some kind. i have no idea what the hell is going on

I guess your CD doesn't work properly otherwise it should boot from there;

as I understand it searches your CD for booting but it cannot find the environment there to boot, therefore it skips to your hard-disk.

You can create a installation diskette under windows. I guess there is a DOS utils section in mandrake linux installation CD1. In windows, try running rawrite for windows which is in your installation CD1. you should have floppy diskette, which will be formatted in this progress. Then write boot images, I don't remember which one now. but one of .img files. Then you can boot from floppy and and continue installation.

good luck !