thank you for getting back to me. I just got back from work and was very pleased that there are some ppl that are willing to help.
Well my system is WinXP pro 30gb HD - no SPs. I partitioned it with PM8 - 10 gb allocated to mandrake, 1024mb on swap, 13 to winXP and the rest to a logical data backup. It's pentium 3, 1.1Gh ...512 ram. I suspect that some of the hardware is "win" but i tried to install fedora, RH9, and some other ..(forgot the name of it) and they all booted without any problems yet they didn't function as I wanted them to - like sound card and modem etc.
the problem is when I boot into linux it takes me to hardware check first and i see that it "oks" all the hardware and then it stopsat "
checking root file system......
/dev/hda3: was not clearly unmounted
"trying to test check forced"
then it says that the system would reboot and it repeats itself over and over....,or if done in a graphical interface it just freezes like 40% down the road.