I am a neophyte when it comes to LINUX. I do use it occasional for programming, etc..., but I never had to configure anything.

I have the iso I burnt to a CD, which I am trying to boot and run. I have WindowsXP installed on my first partition of my first drive. I have a Maxtor 200GB ATA 133 drive which is connected to an ATA PCI card. It does see my drives because I see them listed and their info.

When the system boots I type expert and see what is going on and I wrote down this info:

hde: pio
hde: host protected area => 1
hde: status timeout: {busy}
hde: drive not ready for command
hde: 398297088 sectors (203928 MB) w/ 1819KiB cache CHS = 155114/16/63

I get a similar display for hdf, too.
What is going on and what do I do? I did read some of the posts on here, but none of them were the exact same as my situation. I spent a few hours looking up the info myself. I tried some cheatcodes that I thought would work like nodma, noapic, acpi=off. Nothing works. I really could use the help.

Anyway, thanks for the help in advance.