I get this message when I try to INSTALL Linux Mandrake 8.0, after this message the machine crashes and I can't go on with the installation. Does anyone know the problem here and how I can fix it? Thanx.

how many harddrives do you have?
if 2 is one of them a master and one a slave
if your cd is hooked up to your harddrive see if the cdrom is a slave?

My Primary cable has 2 harddisks (seperate) attached to it.
My secondary cable has 2 CD-Roms attached to it.
The problem is with the slave harddisk (that is primary slave) which is older than my master but it has DMA support (in the partititions, Linux writes hdb:.........(U)DMA). However, this DMA business was also a pain in the neck for Windows, when I enabled it, the system crashed. I think, eventhough it doesn't support DMA, the Linux installation shouldn't have stopped (crashed actually). It didn't crash for Win2000 or Win98, why crash for Linux?

try and connect the slave to the primary master and see if that fixes the error

enter CTRL+ALT+F2 to go to the second screen (maybe press enter to get a shell) and enter
(/sbin/)hdparm -d 0 /dev/hdN
where N is the harddisk char, range a to z.
this will turn off DMA for the disk, but at least you can continue the installation.

I don't know if this will work. Try getting a prompt and then enter ' linux ide=nodma '. You can also check here for more info.