In another thread someone described similar symptoms and claimed
that it works with Mandrake 8.1 with kernel 2.4.8 (which is very old)
I happened to have a set of Mandrake 8.0 disks and that also seems
to work, at least the installer gets started.
I guess we will have to try a 2.4.8 kernel without any Mandrake patches
next....