This is just an introduction to the problems I am having with booting Mageia 1 after what looked like a successful installation. Mageia is a community based distribution forked from Mandriva after it was taken over by Rosa Labs. In 14 years of installation of Mandriva and later Mageia I have rarely had any serious problem with booting the system but this new hardware has stopped me in my tracks.
The BIOS has been updated to A02 and the hard drive boot option switched to Legacy. No problem booting the Mageia 1 DVD. At first I could not partition the disk. What I tried to do was delete the main Windows partition and try to set up Linux partitions in that space. That failed so I started again and succeeded in wiping the whole disk, unintentionally, so I thought why not and carried on. The whole process of a custom install took about half an hour and resulted in a system which failed to boot. At this point I need some sleep. Shall experiment some more but I have this nasty feeling that the hardware is now useless.