I came across a couple of interesting showstopper quirks in an 8.1 install yesterday and just want to share them with you all.
1) I started with initial boot sequence in BIOS set incorrectly with CDROM in the sequence. This was incorrect since my CDROM is SCSI not IDE. Apparent result was that the boot from install CD started but then failed midway along the red line. Boot with alternate 2.2 kernel worked OK with this setup. Correcting the BIOS boot sequence solved the problem and machine booted fine from CDROM. 2) I have always put my swap partition on hda1. Everybody has a different idea of where swap should go, but this is where I put it. I attempted several installs this way and each time went I entered the format stage of the install I took a fatal error 'Unable to mount filesystem' or somesuch. My solution was to examine the disk under fdisk from another system. I then discovered that the install had marked the swap partition with a boot flag. I then removed the boot flag from the swap partition and added it to /boot (hda5 in my case). From there I went back into the install and everything went without a hitch until #3. 3) I selected individual packages on the install. There is no indication which packages are on disk 1, 2 or 3. Obviously some of the packages I selected are on 3. When I reached that point I again errored out fatally and had to rerun the install again with minimal packages selected and that proved to be a breeze and swept me in to an operational system in a matter of a few minutes. The other strange thing (strange to me anyway) is the cryptic licensing notice on disk 3. While disk 3 is a free download and apparently part of the GPL edition that Mandrake has been so scrupulous about in the past, there are these warnings about license issues and that copying disk 3 freely may be illegal? What??? Thanks for listening!
