10.0 installation hangs at installing bootloader

[gnickle]

Greetings,

 

Short version: My installation of 10.0 from CD appears to be going fine until I get to the "Installing Bootloader" step. The installer interface tells me to "Please Wait" and "Installing Bootloader." After 10 minutes and not seeing any hard drive activity, I gave up. Help?

 

Long version: I'm installing on about 5 GB of previously unallocated space on a 13 GB Western Digital drive. The first 8GB is Windows NT. I clicked Auto Allocate on the installation interface to set the partitions, and that seemed ok at the time. When I got to the bootloader step, it asked where to put the loader. I selected MBR (the first choice). After this, the installation apparently hung, so I hit the reset button. I found I couldn't boot into NT. After searching forums, I changed the BIOS to LBA for my hard drive and I can now boot to NT. Tried installing Mandrake again, but it hung in the same place. The partitions were still there, though.

 

I'm a total newbie to Linux, though not PC hardware. Thus, detailed instructions would be helpful.

 

Thank you!

 

--gnickle

[Ixthusdan]

If you have partitions in place, the system is installed, but you can't get to it. So, you need a rescue. However, the first cd won't boot!

 

Download 9.2 cd1, burn it, boot with it, and at the splash screen hit esc, type the word "rescue" and choose the prompt to install lilo to the mbr. hat should fix you up. Ordinarily, any boot cd of Mandrake's will give you a rescue mode on the cd.

[gnickle]

I tried rescue with the 9.2 disc but it gave me some error messages that seemed to indicate that it didn't like trying to fix 10.0 since it was only version 9.2.

 

So, I did a minimal install of 9.2 from disc 1, then installed 10.0 (not update) over that. I'm now up and running. Yay! Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

 

Now I'm off to the documentation/faq's/etc. to figure out how to get all my hardware recognized...

 

Thanks again!