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I have purchased a Mandriva Live cd off of e-bay ($2.00) and the seller sent me 2 identical cd's. I am now guessing that he hasdone so because they are so buggy that he is hoping that at least 1 will work.

Put in the cd, rebooted, stopped boot at BIOS setup and chose cd drive as 1, 2, and 3rd boot source. Upon reboot I got a real pretty orange colored graphic stating MANDRIVA. Wait and wait, I finally hit ENTER and a screen with seemingly endless error messages appeared. This has happened with both disks.
I am running Win XP home on an AMD Duron 900 mhz, 20 gig hdd, 256 mb RAM, and a fresh re-install of the XP.
Am I stupidly doing something wrong or the system incompatible or are the disks frelled?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you

And the error messages say what?

Everything and that I'm too impatient.

Nodsu, just like Underdog, you're everwhere. I just finished a thank you in the Windows OS forum. I want to thank you and others like you who take soooo much time to help those of us who usually get in over our heads. It is only with the help of people like youself that I am able to avoid HIGH priced help, delays waiting repair, and am given the chance to LEARN. Your time and effort is always greatly appreciated.

Apparently I was too impatient on the first 2 tries. Last night I put the Mandriva disk in and PATIENTLY waited and WAS able to access the Man' Live
feature.

Thank you all

My current work PC has a similar issue in SuSE 10.2 - it would spend some 10 minutes trying to initialise the SATA DVD-ROM drive spewing out error messages. At one point it would give up and boot up just fine. Everything (including SATA) works just fine.