First, I downloaded the ISOs and burned them to CD-R. Then, I inserted CD 1 in the drive. Then, I made a boot floppy using CDROM.IMG (I have the ability to boot from CDs (I changed it to booting from CD-ROM first), but CD 1 and 2 refused to boot), booted from the floppy, and pressed ENTER. Later, it said the boot failed and to change disks (not CDs?). The only way to exit setup was to either press RESET or to take the floppy out and press a key, therefore booting into Windows. How do I fix the "Boot failed" error?

Sounds like you either have:

1. A problem with a bad CD ... (what program did you use to burn the ISO)?

2. Your CDROM drive is not recognized by Mandrake.

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I would make a new ISO image for CD1 (writing at a slower settin than before ... I use 4x if I've had problems at a faster speed).

What PC are you doing the install on? (Is it a laptop or a SCSI CDROM)?

I used Nero - Burning Rom to burn it, but you're probably right about setup not recognizing the CD-ROM drive.
I'm using an ATAPI CD-ROM. It's the only one I have. Not sure about the CD burner.

If the CDRW drive is in the same PC (and is seperate from the cdrom drive), try booting from that drive....or using it to install from CD after booting from floppy.

You might also create a boot floppy using Smart Boot Manager.

For WinXP, I downloaded the latest sbminst.exe and cwsdpmi.exe from the download page. I created a dirrectory (named c:\btmgr) and put both files in there. I then opened a command prompt in XP, did the following to get to c:\bootmgr...

c:
cd\bootmgr

Put a formated blank floppy in drive A: (the floppy drive) then issued the following command to make a boot floppy:

sbminst -t us -d 0

(0 is the number ... not the letter O)...

I've got a different problem now. Setup launched, but it was stuck at 30 seconds remaining, none of the buttons worked, and minutes later, I rebooted. Then I launched setup again, but this time, it stuck after choosing a language (English (American)). What do I do to fix this? I chose Partition D: and changed its file system to "Linux native", but I didn't make partition E: "Linux swap". Windows doesn't see D: anymore because it only understands FAT32 and NTFS (which D: was).