I am on Mandrake One 2007.
I had installed it after booting from the live CD.

Now to the problems
1. Plugging in a Sandisk flash Drive did not cause any problems. PLugging in any other external drive - laptop hard disk, MP3 player caused the system to crash, totally. No response to any keys and cold restart was the only solution.
After restart, a lot of files were identified as corrupt, and the OS failed to boot to the desktop.
So I thought of reinstalling the OS from the live CD. This time, the live CD will not completely load. It would stall at different places during the booting, and ultimately crash.
I had to undo all the partitions and then the live CD worked and I could reinstall the OS afresh.
I also found that plugging in the USB printer causes a crash.

So I need answers to :
1. How to rectify the "I'll crash if you plug anything into the USB port" mentality?
2. How can the live CDs behaviour be explained (not loading till the desktop when the local partition was corrupt).
3. What causes a total crash? I had heard that it is hard to cause a total crash in Linux.

Thanks for reading through.

Does this happen when running from the live CD instead of from an installed OS?

Have you tried other live CD's to ensure that it's not just an issue with Mandrake?

If other live CD's are OK then it's probably a driver issue with Mandrake

I tried Fedora 6. It was a non-live DVD. It acted strangely. For example, after the first time the installation got corrupted I tried installing FC over it. The installation process totally skipped the copying files part and went directly to boot loader installtion after selection of packages. In normal circumstances - with the drive partition-free - the installation process stalled many times, and the one time it did complete the installation, it would not boot to the desktop. I put it down to errors with the DVD.

Mandrake One 2008 was also strange. Though I do not recall exactly what was funny about it. In any case it did not install successfully since I am back on Mandrake 2007.

I remember trying out Ubuntu too. It too crashed when the Mandrake installation was corrupt. But, it installed fine when the hard disk was unpartitioned.

If it is a driver issue with Mandrake, how do I rectify it?

The fact that you have had weird issues with a number of OS's suggests that there is something other than a driver issue here.

I am starting to wonder if this could be hard drive related.

Try running directly from a live CD instead of an installed OS and see if you are still getting issues.

I haven't used Mandrake for quite a while now, they always used to be ahead of the game when it came to supporting new hardware, but there were occasional issues where leading edge became bleeding edge.