Installing Mandrake 7.2

[banksam at swanhill.net.au]

When installing it crashed at the stage of making a boot floppy.  This
happened several times so then we tried a text install and skipped the
floppy.  That worked.  Then we tried making the floppy from within
Linux.  That crashed.  We tried formatting a floppy.  That worked ok.
Then we tried making a boot disk again.  The system crashed.  So we
tried making a boot disk manually with 

dd if=/boot/vmlinuz2.2....  of=dev/fd0 bs=8192 

I know this works.  I've done it before.  But the system I am talking
about crashed and then wouldn't reboot.

Has anyone else had similar problems?  Has anyone found a solution??

Arthur