Initial boot hangs after install.

[teets4]

Hello All,
I am trying to install Mandrake 10.1 x86 on my Compaq Presario 2100 and am experiencing the following problem. After installation and the initial reboot Lilo appears and Linux is chosen to boot (Windows XP resided on primary logical partition). After Lilo disappears the system does not continue to boot. The screen is black and there is no activity (i.e. keyboard locked out, screen black, hard drive quiet.) I have let the system sit thinking that it needed time to boot, but after an hour I began to doubt. I have ran through several installations using different setups. Nothing seems to work. I have been searching through several forum strings and have tried the following things...

1.) Disabled Legacy USB support, set the video apeture to 64MB, and disabled wake on lan from power off - all in BIOS.
2.) Typed 'linux init 3' at the boot prompt (suggested by mandrakeexpert.com) and got nothing.
3.) Tested the video configuration during install and saw the rainbow.
4.) Several configurations during installation.
5.) Swearing at innocent bystanders.

...nothing seems to work yet and I thought it was finally time to post. I would appreciate any and all of your support! Thanks.

[smindinvern]

What's your hard drive setup like, e.g. do you have LVM?

[teets4]

I installed Windows XP Pro and allocated it 18G of a 30G hard disk. When I installed Linux I let it configure the free space itself which was Linux Kernel 2.6.8.