Having managed to thoroughly cock up both the software and hardware on my computer, to the extent that Chris, had to dismantle it put the hard drive into his and then heal its wounds, the reconstructed box is now working with windows on the first disk.
Trying to reinstall Mandrake 8, I found that it would go as far as the point where it needs to access the CD and then get stuck, Chris's diagnosis is that Mandrake can only see a CD Drive that is a secondary slave instead of as it is now set up the secondary master.
Has anyone any suggestions, or come across this problem before? I do have disks for Red Hat, but on my machine, when trying to install at 'lowres' the screen displays black text on nearly black background, and is thus unreadable. The more exciting disks, Slackware 8, Debian, Progeny, are beyond my capabilities and being saved for the long winter learning process.
John Seago