I've been trying to help my friend install Linux. However, this has turned into a complete and utter DISASTER. If this explodes in our face one more time, I'm giving up.

I've been trying to get Mandrake 9.2 to install on his computer (Haven't pulled down the 10.0 ISO's yet). However, I'm beginning to think God hates me. We're now on attempt number SIX and only slightly closer to our goal.

For no reason I can understand, the screens during startup are taking an impossibly long time to process. We're talking waiting 4 to 10 minutes between every screen. This is not a stone-age computer: 900Mhz, 40gig HD, 768MB of ram. There is no concievable reason for it to run this slow.

Now if the only problem were things running slowly, I'd be pleased as pop. If only. After the installer imploded at various stages, it finally managed to take the partition table down with it. So now everything on the goddamn computer is lost! It became clear that all hope of recovery was lost when attempting to unmount partitions (Of which the computer was aware) in the HDD partitioning screen elicited "hdlist does not exist."

I went home and burnt a new set of CD's, and they seemed to be working. We're back to "Installing a load of RPM's". It managed to get through the first and second CDs but now it's caught in a horrible loop on the final CD. It's just sitting there, waiting for... something. It appears to have managed to lock up again. We've decided to let it sit overnight in the vain hope that it will finally timeout and let us cancel installation from the 3rd CD.

However, considering our luck so far I wouldn't bet on it. Has anyone else suffered such an utterly uninterrupted series of disasters while attempting to install Linux on anything? And the strange thing is, I've installed Mandrake 8.2, 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 on my computer without so much as a hiccup.

This is what I want to do right now:
I sincerely apologize if this is more like a rant than a request for help, but I'm enormously frustrated with the... situation.

Hmm, all I can think of is bad ram, did you run memtest86 from the linux: prompt upon to boot? If all is good. I dunno. Good luck. Sounds like maybe Fedora would be more your style

They "seemed" to be working? Did you bother to check the md5sum of the ISO's before burning them? What speed did you burn them at?

These symptoms can be caused by a bad CD burn, or just as likely, a failing CDROM drive.

This was the same ISO that I'd used on the previous set of CDs (which has been used in 3 previous flawless installations), with the same burner and options.

But the whole thing about this particular computer is now moot, as the motherboard got fried (which had nothing to do with attempted linux installation). And we had already had problems getting the computer to recognize its drives, so it may just have been a disaster waiting to happen.

I'm a real newbie to any linux OS's but after a few problems with Fedora, RedHat, and Suse..I downloaded Mandrake 10 Official and could not believe how smooth it went. I did get some help from a guy named Chuck who I met here. All I really did was to first put a 5 gig linux partition on my "C" drive using "Partition Magic" Got out of Windows ..rebooted with the install disc1 of Mandrake and away it went. When It got to the partition section, it just asked if I wanted it on the exsisting Linux Partition ..I said yes..And it went beautifully, with no problems......except for me not knowing what the hell to do from there.....But I'm having a great time learning