I just installed 10.1 off the DVD ISO. Installation works fine.

I boot for first time off GRUB floppy. Linux starts until it loads the X Windows Server showing blue screen with "Mandrake" and stars at bottom-right. At this point the system stops and appears frozen.

I switched to a terminal(tty1) and logged in as 'root'. Ran 'top' and noticed that 'drakfirstboot' is running under root account and is at 99+%. It remains like this forever (I have waited over 2 hours). GUI never loads under X.

I tried killing drakfirstboot; it restarts itself and again goes to 99% and stays there.
I can run text-based programs under tty just fine but GUI will never run and drakfirstboot never quits.

Check your X logs in /var/log/X* - it sounds like it's crashing due to a misconfiguration. Running (as root) grep WW /var/log/X* should give a few hints as to what's happening. Then run drakxconfig, or just manually edit your X config file at /etc/X11/Xorg.c/onf (or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4). If it's not X, then check your other logs (in /var/log) for other reasons as to why it's crashing.

Cheers,

mj