Please note: I've sent this here message to everyone, including MandrakeExpert and was wondering if you might be able to offer any ideas? Hey, before I start can I say thanks for all the help! I don't know if this helps with your request for further data but here goes: Right, I fdisk'ed the hard drive into just one partition of some 1.3Gb, restarted the computer and then formatted it to FAT32 using a Windows 98 recovery disk. I then booted from the floppy with the bootdisk from in the Mandrake8 box, pressed enter on the title screen, waited for the bar to fill and then sent the computer to sleep while the text was just beginning to scroll down the screen (The only way that it'll recognise that there is a CD drive). I then hot swapped the CD drive, woke the PC and let it carry on. Upon the graphical user interface I chose English UK. I then selected an expert installation (as recommended installs produce the same result and I'd like a little more data). I heard two beeps while it was "configuring PCMCIA cards...". Mandrake then asked if I had any SCSI interfaces, I answered "see hardware info" and got: "unknown: Opti Inc 82C557 [Viper-M][BRIDGE_HOST]", new line (vertical line between Inc & 82...), "unknown: Opti Inc 82C558 [Viper-M ISA+IDE] [BRIDGE_HOST]", new line (vertical line between Inc & 82...), "Card: Cirrus Logic GD754x (laptop); Cirrus Logic GD 7548 [DISPLAY_VGA]", new line (vertical line between Logic & 7548), "seriel_cs: Seriel or Modem [seriel]". I then returned to the previous menu and answered "yes", choosing each driver in turn from the list, autoprobing when asked, none of the drivers loaded. I then answered "no" and got the: "An error occurred", new line, "An error has occurred - no valid devices were found on which to create new filesystems. Please check your hardware for the cause of this problem". Further to your last question about hardware and manufactures I'm a little stuck as I have no documentation. I've had a little play with a screwdriver but am getting no-where fast. If you think that it'll help Ill get a little more forceful but I'm wary of killing it. Please refer to my previous questions for more data - Briefly: trying to install Mandrake8 in COMPAQ LTE 5380 which previously had NT4 (Service pack 3) on. Received the same set of error messages after going through the install process, pondered if it was because the harddrive was in NTFS so converted to FAT32 using PartitionManager - messed up the PartitionManager process and hadn't created a boot disk so used a WIN98 startup disk to� (See beginning of message). Cheers, Dominic. ____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie
