I have multiple systems and occasionally buy new motherboards and do a "right shift, end off" shuffle. I did that over the weekend and the machine that got the 2nd hand mb is now unable to boot FC4 or Centos 4.3. I had in separate partitions SuSE 9.1, Debian 3.0 and FC4. When I select FC4 from the boot menu, it prints a few of the normal startup messages and then hangs. When I boot from CD either FC4 or CentOS, I get the boot menu, hit return the messages loading linuz and initrd appear, the screen clears and ... nothing. I just see the cursor flashing in the upper left. No disk activity. All 3 appear to stop before they do much of anything. Debian boots fine as does SuSE. I booted a Debian 3.1 CD just for a test and it came up as far as wanting me to repartition the disk, which I declined to do so I know CD installs of Linux are possible.

Hardware details: The MB that used to be in this box was a Celeron 600 mhz atx board with an S3 video card. The new MB is an AMD Athlon XP 2200+, as reported by /proc/cpuinfo with a ATI Radeon 9200 SE as reported by lspci.

I'm fairly certain this is not a CDROM drive issue, but a kernel issue. I did try acpi=off and debug kernel options.

Can anyone shed light on this problem or suggest other kernel parameters that might help?

Thanks,
Jim.