It's possible that you need a special driver installed. There will be floppy images which might have the particular controller driver built in. Read through the installation instructions on the CD. If you had produced a rescue cd with Mandrake's 'mkrescue --iso' command, you could use it to analyze your system and suggest startup options.
Sometimes an option like 'ide=nodma' or 'noapic' will allow you to get the installation done.
Here is a site on additional boot options:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...-bootopts.html
You might want to provide us with the motherboard. Also if you boot up into the rescue mode (use the 'rescue' option on the first install disk) and use the 'lspci' command, that could provide information on the controller that your computer uses.
PS. I was running XP on my Matrix desktop using the raid controller, but when I read about how Microsoft was behind the SCO lawsuit, I got mad and removed it!