I'm fairly new to Linux, as I never got a chance to use it until recently, when I purchased a serial modem to replace my winmodem. Well, it had been a long time (nearly a year?) since I installed Mandrake 10.1 on a 50/50 partition setup, dual booting with M$ XP. This was the first, and successful install attempt.

And I forgot my password. Tried many recent ones, and thought back a while, but I couldn't log in. Rats, I thought, and moved on with life.

Recently, a problem arose where M$ failed me (surprise!) and I acquired a new Dell tower. 250GB HDD, so I stole my old HDD and put it in as a secondary. Backed up my old M$ info, tried yet again to access Linux, and nothing.

So I formatted the entire drive as "ext2/ext3/reiser" (76GB worth) with the rest as swap (which I was told to do, and which I did with the first successful install) and figured on reinstalling Mandrake 10.1 on a separate drive.

Well, my figuring was wrong, because apparently I don't have a CDROM drive. Which is the truth, it's DVD-RW, but does it make a difference?

I know it reads because the ML install screen (F1 for more options, Enter to install) appears. But when I hit enter, I get the same results every time:

Small window pops up saying it's scanning my USB ports, a notice appears that it's disabled #19 (?) and then it says "No CDROM device found." Ok option is present, but enter yields no results, as if the screen is frozen. So I turn it off for the last time, and go back to Vista for now.


My question: Am I forgetting to do something? I read up on other sites that my serial ATA HDD needs to be "enhanced" with some difference in the BIOS, but I've scanned them and found no such option.

I've tried to change boot order. Switching the primary to "removable" allows me a "GRUB loader" screen with various colored pixels and odd characters scattered across the screen. This never progresses into anything else.

Switching to "CDROM" gives me the first result I described.

And disabling all and switching to "other" goes to Vista.

Some sites say a boot floppy fixes this... But guess what? Dell doesn't seem to want you to have a floppy drive. I even searched for the option. I guess I could go buy a drive and hook it up, but is that necessary?

It installed before on the same HDD as Window$ with no floppy, no concerns, no "CDROM" error, even though the initial drive was DVD-ROM.



Any advice is greatly appreciated, and I thank you all for filtering through that novel I just wrote...

I can only suggest that if you're using Mandrake 10.1 that you should download and install a newer version since 10.1 is no longer supported and Mandriva 2008.1 Spring is the current release. Especially if you're using new hardware. Mandrake 10.1 is extremely old now.

Is Ubuntu 5.04 too old as well? Can't exactly download anything with dialup... especially since Vista is "'protecting" me from my serial modem and reducing download speed to half.

I could always drive about 70 miles into the nearest city with a good tech store, and maybe try to pick up a copy of something there.

Does "too old" mean it won't work? I won't ever be able to download updates for Linux anyhow, so even a newer distro will become old within a short while.

Ubuntu 8.04 is the latest release. I'd say that 5.04 is probably from 2005 - so depending on how new the hardware is, yes it could also be too old. Mandrake 10.1 was pre 2005.

If you give me an address, I'll send you the Mandriva 2008.1 Spring One CD to you and you can install from this. Please pm me with the address if you wish for me to send you and save you some time travelling about. Magazines usually have a Linux release on the cover disk if you have a shop nearby that might sell such a thing. EIther way, am happy to send you the disk if you want.

Mandriva 10.1 is much to old itis released somewhere in 2004, Ubuntu 5.04 is also about 4 year old. as Ian said Mandriva 20081 is the recent one 2009 will be comming in october.
The current release of Ubuntu is now 8.04 and 8.10 will come also in october.
So download a current version, burn it and put it in you're dvd-player install it and enyoi.