Aussie John - Thanks for the welcome!
First, to scarecrow varios combos of no acpi and no apic have no effect,
And artic, I believe the install media is good, as I recall I did check them when burned, and have done several installs without problems with both sets. The term easyboot does not ring a bell at the moment unless you're talking about the short form of post. At the moment I cannot run mkinitrd - it just displays the help screen (usage) . I did a chroot to the mounted / partition (sda1) and as root. I probabily try my rusty skill at recommpiling the kernel.
I see that that there are several bugs reported on qa.mandriva.com -- most have no real resolution -- some people have succeeded by listing the saata driver in the modules.preload file, some have not --most have been closed from inactivity.
It appears that the drive is not seen at all after the install. And Fedor sets the drive up as a logical volume (jbod I suspect) it appears. Will have to study up on that. Maybe I will need a second drive and setup a formal raid drive. The sata controller is part of the sis 964 south bridge