I am a newbie, but I have been able to install other versions of Linux.

This is one of the weirdest things that I have ever seen, but much to my dismay I was able to recreate it.

I just got two old scratch boxes they are identical
Compaq Desk Pro's EP/SB series
P3 500 MHz
128 meg ram
10 gig hard drive

So I get my greedy little hands on a copy of Mandrake 9.2 copied off a distribution that has successfully installed several machines, no problem.

So, I figured piece of cake... these boxes aren't that old.
I do the graphical install off of the CD, let it reformat the disk, I get through some of the basics (language, mouse, admin name) then it runs for a little bit and the I get this message that says "An error occurred ldconfig failed" I press ok
it comes back, etc...

Right now things aren't too bad, I figure that I will shut down the machine and try a text install, or check some knowledge bases to see if there is any info on this.

So I restart the machine and it is crawling, taking twice as long to do anything as it did before... and it doesn't recognize that there is a cd-rom there anymore. The drive doesn't even light up when you turn the power on, and I have to open it manually using my paperclip.

Even in BIOS where I once saw a second IDE device, I see it no longer. So being optimistic.. I say, maybe this CD drive is shot... lets try the other box.

The exact same thing happened. So I am now sitting here with two machines that just had there CD drives blown up by a Linux install, and I don't have a clue of what to do about it. If it was just one machine, I would say weird and pick up a new drive... but this is a little odd.

Thanks,
Stephen

That is a little bizarre. If you can (be bothered) try putting one of the CD drives into another computer and seeing if it works.

You may be experiencing this problem (do you have some of the first disks? The solution is posted at the source of the problem here. Sounds like you got bitten by LG/Goldstars non-standard cdrom

Thank you very much, I am going to go over the instructions posted on the web site and see if it doesn't get me up and working.

Thanks again,
Stephen