It is a perplexing problem to me too, even though I am not at all a Linux expert. I liked Mandrake 9.0 a lot but switched to Red Hat 8.0 since my research team is using Red Hat and they are mostly from Computer Science backgrounds. I
loved how Mandrake allows a person to see what is on other, Windows partitions, and manipulate them, immediately after install.
Nevertheless, Red Hat seems to make the team very happy, and we haven't really gotten to
why it does because most of our team has found no problems at all with Mandrake dolphin.
Maybe try RedHat 8.0. Perhaps the installer is running better than Mandrake's.
BTW, did you do a disk check to see that the ISOs that you downloaded or burned to CD were not corrupt? With any luck, your problem is one that is easily solved by doing it over again if you downloaded corrupt data (sorry if that's bad news).