I'm new to linux and trying to set up my laptop (an HP pavilion ze440 with Athlon 22XP-M) to dual boot XP home and Mandrake 10.1.

I went through the install DVD and it said that everything was working fine but when i reboot my computer, and select linux to load the screen goes completely black. No text or curser or anything, however windows still works fine (well not necessarily fine, but as good as windows will ever work, i guess).

I tried both LILO and grub and both get me the same blank screen when i load linux.

I read somewhere that i should disable PCMCIA but...I don't know how to do that (I'm very much a newbie). Any ideas on how to get this to work? Thanks

Try this and see if it boots:

As soon as you see the lilo selection screen hit the Esc key; that will take you to a boot prompt.

At the prompt type:

linux noapic nolapic acpi=off

then hit the Enter key. If it works, post back and we can go into how to make certain changes so you don't have to hit the Esc key every time.

I did what you said and it worked so I went back and reinstalled the software with acpi disabled and now it works without hitting escape.

Thanks so much, man, I appreciate it.