I'm new to Linux and trying to install Mandrake on my computer but the installation process is extremely long or doesn't proceed and I suspect something goes wrong - I was trying 9.2 and 10 (I burned ISO images from the web) with the same result. I have Athlon 2000, 40GB hard disk (WD), 256RAM and Lite-On CD-RW 48x24x48. The HD and CD are both as master drives. I have Windows 2003 installed on NTFS filesystem.

Now when I boot the Mandrake installation CD, I can see my hard drive is detected as hda and the CD as hdc. But then the installation does not proceed but instead every minute I get a new message in the log saying "hdc: lost interrupt" and it goes on and on. With mdk9.2 it proceeded to the stage "Loading program into memory", my CD drive was spinning on its highest speed and after about 10 minutes the progress dialog hardly moved. So I stopped the installation because something obvoiusly must be going wrong. Can anyone tell me what the problem might be?

Some things to check into. First of all, have you checked harware compatibility? Almost HowTo installs will have you do that first. Since it is Mandrake you are trying to install, look up your hardware here, and make sure it is supported. Right now it is the CD-RW, after the install, there may well be other things to chek out. Here is the link.

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/hardware.php3

Before you burned the images, did you do a MD5SUM check? That verifys if the image is good. I have had downloads that were not good, hence the CD's are now a place to rest my coffee cup.

On the install, have you got some unallocated space on HDA? If the whole drive is NTFS, you do not have free space. During the install you can use the Mandrake tools to resize the NTFS partition, and then install Linux.

Some other things to think about. Do you want to share files between linux and Windows 2003? If yes, you will need a FAT32 partition. Linux will read NTFS if you load the correct modules, but writing is much less than reliable.

Also search teh forum for install tips on Mandrake 10 and CD' s not working. I have seen a lot of threads on the topic. I use 9.2, so I have no experience on 10.

Thanks for replying. I found a solution to my problem by searching Google - I upgraded BIOS for my Asrock K7S8X motherboard and the problem was gone.