Haha. For me, Mandrake was the first distro I broke my computer with, around age 12. I wasn't allowed around the computer for a few months, but I did learn a lot about bootloaders.
Huh this is very close to what happened to me - I had once installed Mandrake alongside Windows on my parents' PC some time in the middle school years, and it failed to install itself fully, but it was quick to put the bootloader (LILO, remember that one?) on the MBR. Naturally the LILO config entry for Windows had the wrong partition number or something I don't remember, and Windows wouldn't start anymore.
Mandrake on the other hand had a jolly half-installed X11 windows system which failed to bootstrap itself, leaving me with a nice command line prompt (a good learning experience to say the least.) I think I screwed around with `vi` before my dad called in his friend who worked in software. (Said software friend tried editing LILO config before realizing Mandrake would start in read-only-mode by default (chrooting was something quite alien he didn't work with Linux anyway)), and so he proceeded to use the default partition editor on an MS-DOS floppy disk. Lo and behold said partition editor only works with disks that are 32 GB or smaller. Ours was 40 GB. Partition table borked.
We eventually got it all back. Good experience. I learned about the existence of virtual machines on the desktop (and doing experiments there) right after. :)
