Emmanuel_uk asked:
"kaw
What equipment have you got?
hp a1330n, with AMD64---plenty of power.

What are the messages?
No messages at all; it just stops loading.

What did yout try?
I just stuck the DVD in and it began booting. About 1/2 way through the bottom progress bar it simply stopped.

Is this Mandy one you are trying to install?"
No, it is Mandriva 2006 Free Edition from magazine Linux User & Developer.

I also have Mandriva One on DVD from magazine Linux Pro. It boots and runs with no problem.

It is not a live CD. Mandriva one is just 1 cd, so it contains less package.
According to the magazine, Mandriva 2006 Free Edition is a live "CD" and it does start to boot. It just doesn't finish!

Any ideas as to the problem?

Keith

when the progress bar appears pres <esc> once or twice
until it switches to txt mode. Tell us the last 2 messages

not sure where the problem is, usually it is a hardware
problem, video, sata, sometimes acpi or NIC card

"when the progress bar appears pres <esc> once or twice
until it switches to txt mode. Tell us the last 2 messages"

There are no "messages."

When I press Esc, I see text which appears to describes progress during the loading process. The last two are dealing with USB and SCSI, and both returned [Loaded]. all before them returned [OK].

Then it just plain stopped.

I had no way to copy the text, so the above is the last I saw at the bottom of the page.
Keith

So possibly it is the next step blocking.
Can you compare to Mandriva One (that you said worked)
and see what the next step should/could be?

I do not have Mandriva 2006 Free Edition to be sure

PS: In Mandy 2006 free edition, if you press F1 or F2 at
the very beginning do you get a screen with options
for the boot parameters?

I also suggest you disable the NIC and firewire cards in
the bios and see if this makes any difference.

My guess is that you have a video driver issue.
So the first thing to try would be to test the generic vesa driver:
add to the commandline
xdrvr=vesa
or something of the like
I think the correct syntax is
video=vesa
if I remember well
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO-5.html