On multiple instances, I've tried to install mandrake (and redhat for that matter) and recently have not been able to get past the hard drive detection. The mouse locks and there's nothing more that I can do. I have a working win 2k os installed. I've tried disabling PnP and all the advanced power options, taking out unescessary periphs and usb devices that aren't necessary. The cd's work fine as my roommate just installed a perfect copy on his system. I'm running an athlon on a msi k7t turbo2 motherboard with a via chipset. the text installation and the graphical installation both do the same thing. If this has been asked by anyone else in the forums, or someone can direct me to an answer I'd appreciate it because I've looked almost everywhere. Thanks for your time.

It could be that your existing Win2K OS is conflicting with the Mandrake installer. How is your hard drive partitioned and what kinds of partitions are on it?

Probably the best course of action at this point is to substitute an empty hard drive for your existing hard drive and see if Mandrake correctly installs on that hard drive. If it does, try the installation again with all the PnP, peripherals, etc. again enabled (I suspect that they are not part of the problem). If Mandrake does not correctly install on that hard drive, then the motherboard becomes suspect.

Hard drives are partitioned as follows...

hd 1 - two partitions, 10 and 64 gigs respectively.

hd 2 - one 40 gig partition.

i don't have a spare drive right now, but in the next couple of days i could get my hands on one.

-tom-

Let me know what happens.