Hi,

I just got an Abit VP6 motherboard with dual 700 Mhz PIII's and I'm trying to install Mandrkake Linux 8.0 on it from CD-ROM. I've got a Sparq removable drive and CD-ROM on IDE-0 and 2 20 Gig WD drives on IDE-2 and IDE-3 respectively, both of those are master's. When Mandrake tries to partition the drives, I get the error message:

test_for_bad_drives: can't even read (Input/output error)

This happens no matter where I attach the hard drive (IDE-0, IDE-1, etc.). In addition, I've booted from a DOS floppy and FDISK'd and formatted both the WD 20 gig drives, just to be sure everything is working, which it is. It's just that the Mandrake install can't seem to find them. The text the scrolls by during the boot process seems to see them, it's just when it gets into the installation program that it fails.

I really need some help as I'm at a loss how to get this working and I really miss having a Linux system!

Thanks in advance,
Doug