Turns out a change of CD-ROM drive did the trick with the Mandrake 9.1 install. I don't know why, because this Creative drive is a standard one which has worked perfectly with Linux in the past. Both the working drive (Mitsumi CDRW) and the non working (Creative CDROM) are about 1999 vintage. I suspected it could be related to the use of 700MB .iso images, but Mandrake has dropped those - disc one appears to be 651MB. Perhaps it was burned on 700MB media, and drives more than a couple of years old don't always support that properly. Cheers Daniel
