I downloaded and burned the ISO yesterday. When I rebooted my PC with the Live CD the only option displayed was to run Mandriva and whithout any actions from me Linux was loaded from the CD. After a long time with a slowly moving blue progressbar a teminal window opened. This was'nt exactly what I had expected compared to the many good reviews lately- so what went wrong? Should the Live CD be run from inside Windows first instead of booting, or is my CD corrupt? (Did not have time last night to try to run from windows)

ntovik

Did you run a media check ?
Was the checksum O.K. ?
It should loaded Linux without writing any thing to HD .
When it is running you can use as a test Cd and afterwards you can install it using the install option on you,re desktop

What's "a long time"? Mandriva was just loaded into RAM from your description. It should not end up at a terminal window. The paragraph below is from my abbreviated notes when I installed Mandriva.

Put live-cd in drive, get Mandriva window, message saying booting Mandriva Linux, Loading Kernel, then get Mandriva Window again. Next screen is Booting System, then come to a screen to choose language, choose country, accept license, choose keyboard, choose time zone, choose date-clock (local or utc), choose 3-D effects, then initializing services, loading desktop, KDE running and get Mandriva Screen again. Live CD is installed. Click on Live Install icon.

So something went wrong for you. Did you burn the download iso as an iso image file. Usually avoid problems if you burn at a slow speed (4x). You don't install from windows, you were right to reboot with the CD in the drive. I'd expect the CD is bad. You may try burning it to a new CD and trying again and if that fails, new download and burn. Be sure to do the md5 check.

If the dvd is fine, I'd start looking at the graphics setup,

try booting the kernel with vesa drivers instead of nv or radeon.

Yes, the checksum was OK!
Is ther ea way to start the KDE from the prompt? (I tried Startx with no success)

It should start the GUI be default , it is a complete running system.
Try to start it in verbose mode and tell us error message , press the escape button shortly after so see blue screen

It takes longer then a installed system as it has to probe your hardware and setup all the Hardware during boot.
Remember..it's a live CD.
If you are stuck in a Terminal screen..try by typing XFdrake.
This will start Mandriva's Graphics setup applet.
From there, you can try multiple settings to get things going.

How do you perform the md5 check?

When you use for instance k3b before burning it gives yo
you the checksum compare it with the checksum given by distros website.
Some distros gives you also the possibility of a media check before installing