i386/i686 trouble

[PhytoLinux]

hello, i am a relatively new user to UBuntu, and i have a friend who gave me both the alternate desktop i386 cd, and the regular, non alternate hardy heron cd.

With the alt cd it seems ubuntu cannot detect my drives, yet with the other it goes through memory test, and all jsut fine, up until i install.

it goes throgh its loading just fine, yet right ebfor eit loads the hardy heron desktop installation/partitioning. i get a black screen with a placeholder ( tha tlittle white underscore thing that blinks, to notify you of where the next letter shall be) I cannot enter anything, and it seems to jsut stay there
can someone please help me with an in-depth brianworking here?

[csogilvie]

I struggled a little with my first buildup too.

Perhaps if you told us what hardware you have... That might help.

My system has a SATA CD-rom drive... I had to configure my ISA bus to "RAID" in my bios before the system would recognize the drive and let me install.

[PhytoLinux]

I have a Sony Vaio with a 886Mhz Pentium 3 and 256MB of RAM and a 40Gb PATA hard drive