I'm afraid I have to disappoint you here, Mandrake doesn't always correctly recognize USB drives on Libretto's...
I tried it myself on my Libretto 100CT with a simple USB1.1 external harddisk and this just
produces a stream of letters on the screen or the error you described, either with Mandrake 8, 9 or 9.2. I didn't try 10.
Since I only have 32MB RAM on this thing my options were limited to NFS installation over
the network with a Xircom 10/100 + Modem 56 PCMCIA card, or by sticking the harddisk
in another laptop (such as my Thinkpad R31).
Now if you had a PCMCIA external CD-Rom drive, the story would be different.. because that works.
You can look up the
thread I made some time ago, here.
here to see my experiences..
it may or may not be useful to you.
To keep things short, I have Mandrake 9.0 running on my Libretto 100CT right now with Blackbox as my
primary window manager (very lightweight) and KDE for occasional play. (heavier desktop).
my only leftover struggles are the Yamaha soundcard, USB on the extended port replicator and getting
the screen on 800x480 resolution.. I have not been able to do this and haven't been able to find
help yet either. but i'm still actively looking as I want this to work eventually.
Perhaps you can borrow a laptop for an hour or two and do your install through it, or find one of
those cheap IDE adapter cables to hook the harddisk up to your desktop computer.. or, since you
have the 110CT with 64MB RAM.. you might want to borrow a PCMCIA network card and attempt
to install over HTTP. you'll need Apache on your desktop pc, and the contents of the Mandrake
CD's inside the root folder of Apache so your Libretto can find it there.
I've ran out of ideas for now but i'll be back.. it's nice to see another Libretto user
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