Help Needed: Mandrake 9.2 installation hangs. EDIT: decided to try Gentoo instead.

[DT4K]

I dl'ed the iso's, checksum was good. Burned to cd with Nero at 24x.
Every time I try to boot off the cd and install, I keep getting hangs.
First couple of tries, it would hang right after asking me which mouse I have. The mouse works fine before selecting a mouse. I have a USB Intellimouse Optical, but I tried choosing MS Explorer, Wheel mouse, generic 2-button. Each time, the install would hang. I even tried choosing None and it still hung. Actually, now that I think about it, it seems like there was one time when the mouse pointer froze while just moving it. I hadn't even clicked anything yet.

I also had it hang after selecting English as the language.

And once, it made it past the mouse selection (although I lost the mouse pointer after choosing the mouse and it took about 3 minutes before it went on to the partitioning section). So I used the arrow keys and selected the partition space to use. As soon as I said OK, it hung again. Or at least did nothing for 10 minutes before I killed it.

I'm running:
Abit KR7A-Raid
XP 1700+
512 MB Crucial PC2100
Cendyne Lightning CDR (Lite-On)
WD 800JB
MS Intellimouse Optical
Gainward GF3 Ti200
Currently have Win98 and WinXP dual-booting with 10G free space for Mandrake (or some other distro if I can't get the damn thing to install)

Any ideas on things to try would be great.
Thanks

 

[Tiger]

If you've got an older regular PS-2 style mouse give the install another shot with the old mouse.
On my last Mandy install, 9.0, I saw some real weird stuff happen when selected anything other than PS/2. Once you get Mandy installed you can edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to make the newer mouse work.
If you can't make Mandy work for some reason give Knoppix/Debian a try. I've got a Logitech optical scroller and Knoppix picks it up on boot. If you like running Knoppix off the CD you can always do a HD install later.

 

[DT4K]

I'm sure I've got one around somewhere, so I'll give that a shot.
How do those others compare to Mandrake.

I've had a dual boot with multiple versions of RH and Mandrake 7 in the past. But I still never spent much time with them, so I'm basically a linux newb and looking for a fairly user-friendly distro.

EDIT: this will be a triple-boot, I've already got 98 and XP running and left 10gigs free for linux.

 

[Tiger]

Knoppix/Debian is about as easy as it gets when using Linux.
It runs off the CD drive, albeit slowly. To get the max out of a distro like that I recommend a HD install and you've got the empty partition for it.
You've got some experience multi-booting so set up of the bootloader shouldn't be a problem. Once you get it installed you've got a Knoppix/Debian system and all that that means.

 

[Spyro]

Hmm, Mandrake 9's installer is usually pretty stable. I've noticed that Mandrake ISOs are unusually difficult for most cd burners to get right, which is why I burn mine at 2x and I've never had a problem

 

[DT4K]

Maybe I'll try the ps2 mouse first, and if that doesn't work, i'll try a slower burn and see what happens.
Thanks for the ideas, I'll let you know results later.
Assuming I don't hose my 98 and XP installs that is.

 

[OZEE]

I doubt this helps - other than as maybe another hint to try a ps2 mouse...

I'm using Mandrake 9.1 and I've had some problems with my optical USB scroll mouse. Every so often, it will just freeze and the only way to fix it is to reboot. Sounds like a similar problem. Maybe Manny doesn't like USB mice???

 

[DT4K]

Thanks for the tips guys.
But before I went home, I was looking into some of the other distros, and Gentoo looked pretty cool. So I decided to hold off on Mandrake and give Gentoo a try.
So far, so good.
I'm building the system from the stage 1 tarball. Things are going smooth so far. Started the bootstrap script before going to bed last night (supposedly takes a couple of hours). Then started the "emerge system" this morning before going to work. I'm still not clear on what each step is really doing, but building everything from source definitely has more geek factor to it.

I still may try installing Mandrake at some point, so thanks for the tips.