Hi,
After some trouble booting from the first disk I managed to load from the second one and get Mandrake install to show up.
I have a fairly new computer:
AMD 2600+
Maxtor HD 160 GB SATA
Motherboard Abit NF7-SL
Radeon 9600xt
512 MB of RAM

It seems that everything was recognized ok during the installation boot including my USB keyboard and mouse.
Everything goes fine until I get to the partition section.
At first I prepared a swap partition and a Ext3 partition for mandrake using windows partition magic.
Mandrake offered to format 4 seconds after hitting the ok button the installer hanged.
I rebooted and reformatted to ext3 and again the same thing.
Then I tried ext2 - same result.
I then thought maybe I should not prepare a partition for Mandrake so I deleted the 2 partitions and told mandrake to create them for me on the deleted space on the HD - no cigar.
ok I then thought that I should just skip the format stage and go strait to the install - that seemed to help a bit since Mandrake began coping files to the HD but hang with 4 min remaining to the end.
That happened a few more times - until I gave up.
I suspect the SATA HD or controller which is Silicon Image Serial ATA Sil 3112 Controller, but I don't know what to to....
Any ideas?

Could be the damn apic... I was getting lots of lockups with that. No more now thankfully
When the installer begins, press F1. There you'll get a console.
Type linux noapic nolapic. Check back if that doesn't help.

I'll try that, thanx.
But exuse my newbieness - what is apic/lapic?

Joy to the world,
It worked.
Can you now explain what it does?

APIC (new standard, old was APM) is for power management. It enables auto shut off and that kind of stuff but with some motherboards it's a huge problem. In my case, I was getting random lockups rendering my system to a windows 95 with 1mb ram clone.

APIC is support for multi processor machines if Im not mistaken. It conflicts with ACPI which causes the machine to hard lock. To enable the ACPI, you have to disable APIC.

Oh my bad then... got confused, thanks for the fix up.
APIC info: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/hwdev/...c/io-apic.mspx
ACPI info: http://www.acpi.info/

Ok thanks,
From what I read APIC is used to replace the old PIC.
Sounds like a good idea.
Whats causing the lockups then?
Doesn't linux kernel "knows" how to use this APIC?
is MS proprietary technology?

It's not propietary but it's still buggy withing linux I think. For some people it's no problem, for some like me it was (a REALLY annoying problem).

It was very annoying for me also. The only place it would really be used that I can think of is in a server or something of the sort with dual processors or more.

Yes, and I read that intel has shipped an apic within it's processors since 1995, but I don't know about amd. Maybe that contributes even more to the locking up

Greetings all,

Thanks redeye - ran into the same lockup when Mandrake 10.0 was partitioning - you are a god ( or at least know a trick or two ... )

Also that was after my machine ( xp 1750 - asus A7N8X ) would not boot Disk 1 - had to use Disk 2 - then hit F1 and typed in " linux noapic nolapic " - then tabbed and when asked about install disk - inserted Disk 1 and from there everything went fine.

Linux Guru? haha, far from it. In fact I've been into linux just a couple of months but I like to help as much as I can. Glad to help

I'm having the exact same problem with my install of Mardrake 10. I bought a new computer and was going to have a dual boot of Windows XP and Linux.

I installed windows and using partition magic I set aside 8Gb for linux. Went to install, waited 4 hours for the program to load to memory only for it to crash after the select language screen, then found out about noapic (using a Asrock K7S8X Mobo). Entered "linux noapic nolapic" at the command and it loads the DrakX installer. I have tried about 8 times to install it it but no good. Furthest I got was the post install configuration then it crashed.

Now when I try to do it, it gets to between 4 and 8 minutes and then hangs completely. I have tried lots of commands at the pre boot command line thing. Such as linuxmem=512MB, ide=nodma, acpi=off, but nothing seems to work. Always crashes at some point during the package install.

The last two times I have tried it won't load the DrakX installer and I get the error message

"exited abnormally :-( signal 11
termination signals......
kill signals.....
unmounting filesystem..... etc...

Don't have a clue what to do now. I've looked at lots of different forum and tried everything people have suggst to people with similar problems to me but none seem to help.

YOU ARE MY LAST HOPE......... PLEASE HELP ME!!!!!!!!!!

btw sys specs

Athlon XP2800+
Asrock K7S8X
512M DDR Ram (333MHz)
Geforce FX5200 128Mb
80Gb HDD
MSI 52x32x52 CDRW
16x DVD ROM (slave)

Maybe you got faulty cd's!!! Order some from www.easylinuxcds.com and try them out to see if that solves the problem.