[plug] Mandrake 7.2 installation hassles - update

[Dennis Plester]

To all those who posted various suggestions, thanks for your help.
Unfortunately, I could not get Mandrake 7.2 (final release) to correctly
install.

I tried three fresh installs, and three upgrades from 7.1, using both custom
and expert modes, with the graphical and text based installers. If I choose
a fresh install, all the packages appear to install, but when the installer
gets to the bootloader section, it reports an error, "name field invalid
hash value" and stumbles on, without allowing me to go back and install a
bootloader. Any attempt to make a boot floppy disk also fails. After this,
if I boot up using a previously made boot floppy, the /boot directory on the
PC is effectively empty. I can get into KDE2, but virtually all of the
options/menus, etc fail, GNOME refuses to run, and I can not mount my CDROM
drive or burner. There are several other reports of other people suffering
this install bug on the web as well.

If I choose upgrade, the install travels smoothly, installs my choice of
LILO/grub and lets me make a boot floppy. When I boot up though, KDE2 is
very flaky, and my new kernel has no sound, vfat, ISO9660 or SCSI emulation
support, and it won't allow me to mount anything, rendering my CDROM/burner
drives and Win98 partition access useless. I'm sure I could fix this if I
had the time and patience, but I'm pretty much out of both.

The two 7.2 iso images I downloaded appear to be fine. I know at least two
people who have performed installs/upgrades from them without any major
problems. I also know that my hardware can't be that weird or
malfunctioning, because when I gave up and reinstalled 7.1, everything fired
up after the install, first time, including the IDE burner. 

(For the record, my PC: Celeron 500, Abit BH6 motherboard, 64 MB RAM, Nvidia
TNT2 video card, 2 x Voodoo 2's running in SLI, Generic ATAPI 40x CDROM,
Mitsumi IDE CDRW, Seagate 13G hard disk, Soundblaster Live)

Life is too short, so I'm sticking with Mandrake 7.1, but I'm going to look
into upgrading to KDE2, so I can check out this Konqueror that everyone
keeps raving about!

Sorry for the big post, but thought you might be interested. Thanks again
for all your suggestions.

Dennis.