This distro I'm afraid seems to have Mega problems right out of the box. IHaving spent a load of time downloading the 3 CD's I thought -- OK let's try it.

Well on a Sony VAIO laptop the wretched thing wouldn't boot from CD 1 (Install)

Gets up to HDA LOST INTERRUPT


then hangs.

Any amount of different parameters to
disable dma or other things makes no difference.

I'm afraid this distro needs a bit more work -- Some of these developers REALLY OUGHT TO BOOT THE SYSTEM ON TYPICAL LAPTOPS before releasing their distros.

I know it's still a Beta -- but BOOT ought to work even if nothing else does -- and these days Laptops are a VERY IMPORTANT MARKET. -- I can see myself not having any desktops at all in the near future and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Sorry for the caps but knowing the importance of this distro to Mandrake I expected a bit better.

I had same kinds of problems with serialATA disk with promise controller. I solved it by putting
noapic as boot parameter. Or some version of that like:
apic=no
noacpi
acpi=off

... i get mixed with those acronyms

you can also try:

pci=noacpi

(read that somewhere)

This varies by manufacturer. I have an ECS computer that will not boot from any CD with APIC on. The other brands I have used have all worked (Soyo, Soltek, Gigabyte).

It seems the manufacturer is the one to talk to about this problem.

As for laptops, I have had the most success with mandrake and xandros. These are fairly new distros, so that is not too surprising.

I had a go at booting it in a Sony Vaio and got exactly the same error, this was the MD10 Community. Oh well, time to try 8.2 see if it works.

Only tried the 64bit version on a laptop but that didn 't go anyhwere.Booted but that was it - couldn't read the partitions on hda or delete them or anything.Very strange.