madape

:D Thanks for your responses. I looked at the cd from the terminal as you suggested. It had identified it as a scsi drive, which was a bit strange. I got round that problem okay. (Didn't mind that it identified it wrong, as long as it worked) Although now I'm wondering if it is the installation discs, as I didn't md5sum them (I just thought that was for paranoid people). And now whenever I install anything new from the mandrake install discs (I tried adding xine and mplayer), the links in the start menu dissapear, and the ones that are there are broken. I tried a reinstall, and now the mbr is messed up, it just shows a screen of full of "99 99 99 99 99 99". I despair Thanks for your help anyway

I'm sure you've heard this problem many many times before, having read a lot of the hardware problems, but I haven't been able to find a concrete solution. I'm using an ECS K7SOM+ motherboard with an onboard 1.3ghz Duron, 256 mb ram (64 if which is shared with the onboard graphics) and an 80gb hd. I used MandrakeMove to check out the OS before I installed it, and my AOpen CDRW was working perfectly. Then I installed the download edition of Mandrake 9.2. When I put a CD in the drive and click the desktop icon, the Konqeuror window freezes. I tried to mount it manually, but it said there was no record in fstab. Not knowing much about linux, I don't know what should be in the fstab file. I tried looking at harddrake, and it said there was a CDRW on hda but it didn't seem to recognise it. It couldn't recognise my hd either, but since I could open my home directory I didn't worry about that too much. I logged out of my account, and tried to log back in. It froze when it tried to load KDE (when it got to the spanner icon). I looked at the hardware list at the mandrake website, and it says all Aopen drives should be compatible. Does anyone have any suggestions. My language isn't great at the best of times.