Mandrake 7.2 freshly installed on a Dell Latitude laptop (233 processor, 128 mb ram -- I decided on Mandrake 7.2 after lots of experimentation with different distros to find what would work best on this machine). The computer has a single bay shared by a cd-rom and a floppy drive, which you can switch in and out.

Everything's great, except when shutting down the system with the cd-rom in place. It goes through what I assume is most of the shutdown, but then it gives this error message and just hangs there:

Ummounting file systems: end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 0

I take this to mean it's trying to unmount a floppy disk that's not there. Anyway, it gives that message and just stays there, so I have to turn the computer off without completing the shutdown.

Then, the next time I restart it, it goes through a time-consuming check on /dev/hda1 because it wasn't "cleanly unmounted."

Shutting down with the floppy drive in place is no problem. Any ideas on how to make it shut down cleanly when the cd-rom is in?

Mmmm... Well, you'd better to install a Mandrake 10... Or, if you're a Ninja warrior, a Slackware 10 .

I tried Mandrake 10, but I can't get a video display for the installation. I've tried various versions of the major distros, and even a few of the lesser-known ones like Buffalo, Vector, Peanut... Considering hardware support, performance, and features, Mandrake 7.2 seems to come out best all-around.

I guess what I was hoping for would be that there's a config file somewhere, where I can just edit a line and tell it not to perform the unmounting during shutdown, or something like that.