[Wylug-help] mandrake installation problem - please help

[Ciro A. Soto]

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I tried to install mandrake but failed.
My system: HP, Pentium 4, 3GHz, 512Mb, 160 Mb HD, cd r/w, dvd r/w,
My OS: Win XP Home
Disk Partitions:
D: FAT32 ,5Gb. It containts the OS for restoring
C: NTFS , the rest of the disk, Booting diskwith OS XP Home. No other vital data.

I wanted to keep the XP, and have a dual booting option.

I bought Partition Magic 8.0 (a waste of money I now ralize)
I downloaded Mandrake 9.2 from a mirror site in Vienna. Three CDs
in ISO format. I checked them with MD5 and all passed.

Using PM8.0 I resized the C: to 20Gb only.
I partitioned the rest with 500Mb for linux, 500Mb for linux swap,
and left about 140 Gb with no partition (hoping to claim it after linux installation)

When PM8.0 finished the partition, it rebooted. I had the CD1 from Mandrake9.2
ready in my cdrom, and started the installation.

First, the installer gave me three options:
A) start from scratch.
B) recognize the current partitions
C) auto partition

I chose B, but it didn't recognize the partitions made by PM8.0 (this is why
I say it was a waste of money).
Then I chose option C. A new default partition was performed by Mandrake installer.
I chose the packages I needed to be
installed (most of the list). The installer started to copy files from the CDs but
several files were not unable to be installed. I ignored these messages and
continued installing. It took several minutes (20 to 30 mins) installing software
until a point where it prompted an error message about being unable to finish the
installation. It went back to the package list to choose from. It was impossible to
get out this loop and I had to restart the computer. Then I was unable to
run XP.

QUESTIONS
1) what did I do wrong?
2) Where can I get a reliable copy of Mandrake CDs?
3) Could anybody explain to me the installation process or direct me to a website?
thank you
Ciro
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