Mandrake 10.1 and an external DVD drive

Just recently sold my desktop trying out an all laptop environment...

I have an external DVD drive (an external case with an IDE drive) and I'm trying to get it recognized by Mandrake 10.1

I had been running Fedora 3 and 2000... worked fine on the desktop, but on the laptop I got the same bootloader issue that scared me from Fedora 2.

So I am back in Mandrake 10.1 arms and I think to stay... if I can resolve this dvd issue...

That all depends if your computer supports booting from an external drive. This will be a bios setting and some motherboards do not support this at all. Others you need to flash your bios with an update to get it to boot off the external disk.

Search for info based on your system, and that should give you an answer.