Okay, tried making a floppy from the cdrom-changedisk image, but got the same error when I tried using it at the point we thought:

inst: Floppy is not a Linus ext2 floppy in first
floppy drive.
Retry?

I've also not joined the Mandrake community thing, so I can't ask them for support. I'm suprised that others have run into the same problems, but not found a solution.

By the way, is Red Hat difficult for newbies to use? There seems to be a lot of talk on this Dell support page about RH9. I think this machine is officially supported for RH9.