Hi guys.

Just got myself a copy of Mandriva Linux 2005. Excitedly booted my pc from the cdrom and it asked me to press enter to install. Upon doing this it then told me,

"Could not mount compressed loopback"

Ive never had any experience of linux so I have absolutely no idea what that means. This problem occurs before the installer has started. Hope somebody can help, Thanks all.

Do you have windows installed on the hdd your trying to install linux on?

i have an older version of mandrake linux i downloaded which works fine despite being in portugese which i cant change. the previous linux installed fine so i dont know whats wrong. im not sure if formatting the hard drive is a good idea due to a possibility of a lack of drivers with linux. I dont know if it includes drivers with it or not.
Windows 98 used to be on there but not anymore. Hope that helps.

Dont format the drive. Linux needs to do that. Windows and Linux do NOT need to communicate at all so what you need to do is start with raw storage space (unformatted and unpartitioned). Then boot with linux

im sorry to sound stupid, but how would i find out my storage space is raw, and if it isnt, how would i go about doing that?
Thanks for all the help.

Delete the partition(s) that are on it. I am not familiar enough with linux to say for sure but I am almost certain that linux has an "FDisk" type utility. For all that you could use a windows98 startup floppy and run fdisk BUT..You need to becareful deleting partitions. You could loose your cd rom drivers and/or worse, some manufacturers will write some of the BIOS to the hdd and if you delete them.........

Some one will be along here shortly that knows linux... lets give it a minute before you do any deleting of anything being I am not 100% on the "how to" of linux utilities.

are you going to want windows installed? If so.. we can knock this out easily.. simnply install windows first.. and when your partitioning the drive leave a section of the drive untouched.. not formatted or partitioned.. then once windows is installed.. boot with linux disk and follow instructions

windows isnt installed on it at the moment and i dont want it on there. i just want mandriva linux as a stand alone os. thanks for continued help.

It does not matter what you have on your HD, if you try to install Linux it will give you options to either delete and format all partitions or to use any unused space on your HD. Linux can do it automatically or if you choose you can create and format partition manually.
Why not use the latest, Fedora Core 4 (Fifth Edition)?
You can also Gdisk the HD then create one primary partition and then proceed with installation, Linux will take care of any conversions. I am trying it out myself so I'm not 100% sure about the drivers but I haven't had any problems using my computer so far!

The problem is the pc crashes with the error before the linux install program has loaded. Im afraid i dont know anything about how to partition a drive or create raw disk space.

Have they changed some thing..? I am not to familiar with linux but when I installed RedHat 9, I had to delete all partitions then install Windows first, leaving x-amount of space available for linux.

when i installed mandrake afew years ago, i used partiton magic to create a seperate partiton on my hd. changed bios to boot from cd, mandrake recogonized both the windows and new empty partiton. i selected to install to the new partiton i created which was one of several possible options. sounds like you cant get that far though.

one of the best places i've found to ask these questions is on the gentoo website (dot org NOT com); *very* active, easy on noobs and they could care less what distro you use

Now.. that is something I would have to see to believe. I have found that most die-hard linux users can not stand n00b's. This, I also believe, stems from a lack understanding Windows.