hangs at stage1 during boot

[pka75]

I just installed mandrake 7.1 and when I start up the computer it hangs at "Stage1" and it takes 30 or so minutes for it to finally load linux. I am very new to this and have no clue where to begin. The computer is an old acer laptop with p120 and 48 megs memory with a 1 gig hd. I am using KDE as the desktop environment and lilo as the bootloader. If I have left out any valuable info just let me know. Thank you.

[bdg1983]

Linux does take some time to load if you have a lot of services that are starting, but 30 minutes is too long.

How is your laptop configured? Dual boot etc. What partitions?

Have you tried a reinstall? May not help, but who knows.

Can you try another distro?