Hi

I have a new Dell Vostro 400 with Vista preinstalled and want to install mandriva spring 2008.1 as a dual boot

I try booting from the Mandriva 2008.1 DVD, and part way through it tells me no CD drive detected (even though it is booting from it!), I assume this is because it is a SATA CD drive? I have tried as in another post making sure SATA is set to IDE in bios which it is (only other option I have in bios is to set it to RAID) and it still won't work.

Any suggestions please?

Thanks

Could be it. Have you tried to install from USB drive?
Contrary to what happens with XP and Vista, where installing from USB DVD-ROM is not an option, due to the installer nature, under Linux it's fairly easy.

I don't have an external USB dvd drive or cd drive unfortunately, with other linuxes they have had the facility to create a bootable usb stick and these install fine, can I do this somehow with mandriva?

I have a Vostro 200 and installation hangs when it's trying to recognize (I think) the hard disk. It says:

Installing driver for the card
disk|card_reader|ide|scsi|hardware_raid|data|firewire Intel Corporation|82801|(ICH9 Family) 2 port SATA IDE Controller.

About your problem, you can try to burn the network install CD and install from Internet, if you have broadband.