OK, so I just installed a freshly downloaded copy of Mandrake 10.0 onto a freshly formated harddrive (fresh being the theme of the night) and when I go to boot the computer in linux, straight from the install, the system goes from the boot menu to this:

"loading linux..................
BIOS Data Check successful
uncompressing linux...ok, booting the kernel"

and then it just hangs. XP is on a completely seperate drive from the linux drive, so I don't think it's causing any conflicts. Might it be an install configuration problem? I'm a relative n00b to this, so any help would be appreciated.

SUCKS TO BE YOU!!! =D

Ok ... just kidding.. =D .. actually i've got the same problem ...

I run Debian on my server box ... and it has worked fine with kernel 2.4.x ... i thought i'd update to the latest kernel of the 2.6 series (2.6.8.1) ... after it was done ... i rebooted.. and the last line it shows is the same one you have. .." uncompressing linux...ok, booting the kernel" ... since it being my server box and it works fine.. and there really is no need to be running the 2.6 series at all... i didn't look into the problem that much... messed around a bit in the grub config but it didn't help ....

Well, now... i've reformatted that whole drive to clean it up from junk i've produced.. *hehe* ... i first tried the debian sarge cd with the 2.6 series kernel... same thing happened... i tried it with the live cd.. same thing happened... tried installing 2.4 series then compiling the kernel myself... same thing happened =/ ...although i haven't tried it with Lilo ... i doubt that has anything to do with it....

Just like deathcrush19 said.. any leads would be appriciated... i've looked fro a log file.. can't find any grub log file in either /boot/grub/ or /var/log/ ... i'm guessing there might be something about it in kern.log ... but it's a little bit hard to find out what when i don't know what i'm looking for .. hehe =D i'm guessing maybe something after the line:

Sep 29 02:01:27 localhost kernel: Kernel command line: root=/dev/hda1 ro

oh well =D ... gl hf... please tell me if you get it working DeathCrush


oh... one more thing... you might try turning on/off (whichever you don't have now) framebuffer ... in grub .. just add the the variable vga=xxx ... i use vga=788 for 800x600 in 15bit color mode (i think) ... this worked for the 2.4 series kernel.. but not for the 2.6.... =D gl hf