i don't know if this will help, but at the crash try alt-f3, alt-f4 etc and see if there are indications on the consoles what was going on at the time bascule Shawn Tayler wrote: > > Hi Guys, > > Just trying out Mandrake 7.1 and I can't get past the Partition setup page during >the install. It always chokes while > formating the last partition on the HD. The error says that a bad parameter was >passed, but not to what it was > passed to. > >