ok, im setting up an mp3 player for my friend, so i slapped together some parts, but i cant seem to make it boot from the CD and therefore cannot format the secondary drive. so basically, i need some way of formatting a drive ot fat32 using mandrake. there is probably some simple thing to do, but i dont use it as nuch as i should and dont know.

What exactly is that you want to do? Install an mp3 player on a pc? On a Linux Mandrake?
Anyways, you can format a hd to fat32 by typing in a terminal window

su root
[enter root pass]
mcc

In mcc go to the "Mount points" section and from there to 'partitions'

Is booting from the CDROM not an option in CMOS? Or does it not find a boot record on the CD, and so skips it?

If the former, you might need to do a BIOS upgrade. If the latter, you probably have an old CDROM that can't read your CD properly. CDROMs don't age well. If you are putting together an old system to be an MP3 jukebox, a new CDROM would be a good investment.

Can you tell me the make and model of the motherboard?

well after putting the drive into my server and formatting it from the CD it says that it is fat32, but also that it is not formatted. i put it back into the other comp, but it won detect.

repo man: i have it on a diffirlent motherboard now, the CD appears to be the problem, but it was worknig before i took the comp apart.

those microsoft bastards made the win95 not a boot CD, good think it was the only softawre we ever bought from them

How 'bout just formatting the drive on a Windows box and then putting it in the server?

fdisk and mkdosfs ?

those microsoft bastards made the win95 not a boot CD, good think it was the only softawre we ever bought from them

Young pup.
When Windows 95 came out, booting from a cd drive wasn't even a wet dream.
The bios of the time didn't support it. So why should the cd support it?

yeah.. the floppy days..