Yet another Installation Probelm

[Soundprizm]

Hey guys, just signed up to the board, and will probably be coming back often... hehe... :D Alright, well, I decided to dive into the linux world cause I'm sick of Windows problems. I finally decided on which distro to go with... Mandrake 9.0.. It's too bad I can only get the standard version through download though! pffft... I downloaded the 3cd's and burned them with nero 5. All went good, and I booted with the 1st cd. Went through all the installation steps and it brought me to the installing files screen. I thought everything went well. I found that my pc froze. I have no clue on what to do. I have dual boot win2000 and XP on my system now. All have separate partitions. The partition I'm using for Mandrake is a 9-10gig Linux Ext3. I've read into the forum a bit and saw that people have been having problems with Nvidia based cards. I do have a Geforce3 in my system. I do also have an ATI All In Wonder 9500. Should I use this instead. Could this be causing the problem? All replies are most welcome.

[ChickenTrucker]

Well, if it just freezes and you have no error messages, it will be a trial and error process. Could be BIOS settings or memory; Linux isn't as tolerant of hardware and memory problems as Windows. I've had both Nvidia and ATI cards, and don't think just the cards will do that. Sometimes bad cache on the CDrom, the CPU ,or the harddrive will do it, or an improper partition table, etc. Usually a lot of stuff will scroll by during booting; see if there's something like 'xxxx probe failed' or 'xxxx not found' or ' can't mount xxxx', 'cylinder overlap at xxxx',stuff like that. Others will be along with better ideas, so don't give up.

The main problems I had with Windows was that the code is mainly written poorly; MS uses a lot of Computer Science grads who have nice resumes, regardless of competence, and a lot of device driver coders haven't a clue about assembly language.