I'm celbrating the new Ubuntu release by trying to get Mandriva going! I have an older computer that was "just sitting there," and thought I'd try a new distro. Mandrake came up, so I downloaded and burnt the cd. It seemed to take forever to load as a live cd, but once it did, I liked it. But when I tried to install it to the hard drive, it just sorta froze, and went into a weird endless loop, just looping back to a tag that asked if I wanted to log in as host or guest, which I assume was supposed to access the web browser.
I've re-downloaded and am trying to get it to run, but after the first few screens, (language, keyboard, promise to forfeit my birthright if I use their software),the cd starts running, and, well, running.
And running and running and.....
It's been going for well over an hour, and nothing happens except I wonder a cd drive has ever gone in to meltdown. I thiught I might have had a bad download the first time, now it's just a contest to see how long I can go before hitting the off button and throwing the cd in the dump.
I remember that Debian took what seemed to be an eternity to load, but at least it just downloaded an installer, and the "forever" was from downloading the software over the web. Maybe Fedora took a while, too. But this seems to be way out of line for a system to load up. Especially since I ran Ubuntu over my lunch hour!
Is this normal, or have I gotten something butchered up? And does the cd drive explode if it gets more than 20,000 hours on it?

Post the specs of the machine involved. There is no Mandrake anymore. What version of Mandriva are you attempting to install?