ok i am new at mandrake and i run an antholon xp 1900 mhz processor with a 64mb nvidia agp video card on a 30 gig hard drive.

i downloaded the iso and burned it at 4x speed

but every time i boot it up i press enter and i get an error message saying "fatal error finishing initialization"

if i press alt+f3 i get on the last few codes or sentences or what ever "succeded isofs found mandrake linux cdrom, good news
total memory 512 mbytes
trying to load /sys/tmp/image/install/stage2/mdkinst_stage2.bz2 as ramdisk
mounting /dev/ram 3 on /sys root/tmp/stage2 as type ext2
fopen (stage1.c:3831) failed: I/O error
unsetting automatic"

and when i press alt+f4 i get on the very last thingy
"checktime reached, running e2fsck is recommended."

i was told linux was a really good o/s but installing it is frustrating

oh i forgot, i partioned the hard drive so i could have windows xp on one side and mandrake on the other. i used partion magic and made a partion a ntfs and ext2. the ntfs is occupied by windows and the ext2 was supposed to be for linux

The errors seem to indicate a problem reading the CDROM. Either a problem with the DISC or the drive. If you also downloaded the md5sums or the .asc file, the cdrom burner program may be able to check the integrity of the CDROM image. It is possible that the image file itself is corrupted.

It would be better to delete the ext2 drive and let the install program create one. Ext3 or reiserfs might be a better choice anyway. Plus, there will be another swap partition to create. By the way, the DiskDrake partitioner will also resize an NTFS drive.