I just booted from the Mandriva 2008-RC2 installation DVD hoping to install it. It failed to detect any of my hard drives and aborted the install. This is very troubling since the Mandriva 2007 Spring Free DVD did detect them and installed without a problem. I still have 2007 installed. Is it possible to do either an upgrade install or a clean install of Mandriva 2008-RC2 from within 2007? If so, could someone point me to a blog which explains step by step how to do it? If not, is there a work-around which does not involve building a modified kernel with Promise 20269 support built in?

There are some changes in the handling of IDE controllers in 2008, resulting in some bugs, not all of which were fixed before RC2 was issued. You may want to try downloading the boot.iso and see if you get any further doing a network install, or wait for 2008 official, which should be available early next week.

I just received the new Mandriva 2008 DVD, and as you suggested that it might, it does support the Promise TX2 20269 (PATA133) PCI IDE Controller card. So your advice was 100% accurate. Unfortunately, there is yet another problem with Mandriva 2008 which is preventing me from upgrading my Mandriva 2007 Spring Free. To address that I have created a new thread in this forum titled, "Mandriva 2008 Fails To Update Mandriva 2007 Spring Free."