Hello, and thanks allot for reading.
I recently decided to give linux a try for the first time after hearing such great things about it. So I decided to dowload it and the version I chose was Mandrake 10. When I formatedmy HD and inserted the 1st of 3 cd's everything worked fine and seemed straight forward. I thought great, this is simple enough. Well this is my first attempt at even using linux butI hate ms products so much that I was and am willing to learn. Anywho, I ended up getting past every screen until it asks me to partition, I chose the option to wite theentire drive. Well my HD worked for maybe 3 seconds before it froze, so I restarted and the same thing, Ihave tried every option in the partitioning section of the install screen and it keeps on freezing, today I read that itmight be my USB mouse and well I tried a PS2 mouse the same thing happened. If anyone could held it would be a great deal of help.
Thanks again. Nick. Here are my system specs if that will help.

PIII 600 MHz
ATI Radeon VE (7000)
Realtek ( or something likethat ) NIC.
C-Media Soundcard
LG CDRW
Pioneer DVD
Asus P2B-..

I know this is not much info but help wouldbe much appreciated.THanks again.

LG drives and Mandrake do not like each other: http://www.linuxcompatible.org/story23052.html

This was true for 9.2, but I can't find any confirmation if the same goes for version 10. Perhaps you should try Yoper instead. This Debian based distro will not damage your lg drive and is geared towards new users.

The thing with the LG drives is a kernel issue which isn't totally 'fixed' until 2.6.8.1, tho mdk 10 does work with LG thanks to some user space fixes.

The freeze with mdk 10 while partitioning the drive seems to happen on some boxes. Not sure why. My suggestion would be to try a custom partitioning and see how that goes.

how do i repartition? I have nothing on the drive, but I do know how to use fdisk pretty well. How big should I make the partitions. And as for the LG drive, well the same happens if I attempt the install from the LG or Pioneer dvd drive.