No, I don't want to start another religious "What Distro is best" thread. I'm looking for ANY distro that will work on this setup. Please read the entire post before posting a reply, as I may have already tried your suggestion.

First, here's the specs on some old boxes we have at work:

Pentium Pro 200 MHz
96 MB RAM
Onboard VGA Video Card
2 GB SCSI Hard Drive
12x SCSI CD-ROM

The SCSI Controller resides in a PCI slot. It has its own BIOS-space utility that can be disabled.

Even when disabled, it appears that it "tricks" systems into thinking the SCSI drives are IDE. So no problem, right? Just install any streamlined distro as if it were IDE. Wrong. :[

EVERY distro I have tried fails in one way or another. ISOLINUX based boot CDs fail because after reading the boot information from the CD, they can't find the CD-ROM drive afterwards. SYSLINUX fails in a different way depending on the distro. Boot floppies fail at some stage or another, even floppies geared towards SCSI devices.

Before the list of distros I've tried, please note the following:
1) I always check the md5sum to see if the iso is correct.
2) Assume there is nothing wrong with the installation media (I verify and don't use CD-RWs).
3) I try to be very thorough when I try these things. If I say something didn't work, I tried it more than once, sometimes even re-creating the media necessary, just for voodoo charm.
4) If you need more information than what I give, ask and I will probably have a quick answer for you. If I don't, I'll try whatever you suggest and get back to you.

Here is a list of distros I have tried and what went wrong...
1) DamnSmallLinux: Cannot boot from CD, and also see http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=478201 (fyi: this happens even when I don't try the poorman's install)
2) DSL-N 0.1RC4: Cannot boot from CD, Boot Floppy fails to boot, gives no really good reason why ("Boot failed.")
3) Vector Linux 5.1 Standard: SCSI boot floppy fails to find drives, cannot boot from CD
4) Puppy Linux: Cannot boot using any method prescribed on the Puppy Linux site

These are the four I have tried so far. I'm willing to try ANY distribution that is streamlined and full-featured enough to be used for a run-of-the-mill workstation. The ability to use smbfs or a similar utility is a must, as is the ability to read NFS'. (Is there a distro that can't?)

I'll try anything. Lead me!

You have another computer right? (your sig says AMD 64-bit 2.2 Ghz)
Why don't you try a pxe install?

Post the make / model of SCSI controller.

Interesting... I googled pxe install and read about the premise... it seems doable, because the boxes do have ethernet cards... but I've never tried this kind of installation before. Can you point me to some good walkthroughs? I found this resource (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/talk/node/248) for DSL, but it doesn't really help someone who isn't at all familiar with pxe installs...

Adaptec AHA-2940 Ultra/Ultra W using the Adaptec SCSISelect Utility v1.23

UPDATE: The BIOS doesn't support LAN booting... unless I can find an updated Phoenix BIOS patch, pxe might be a no-go. :[

Try slackware with the adaptec.s bootdisk. It supports the AHA-2940 card.

Ok, I'll give that a shot...

Hey, Slackware got itself on there! That adaptect disk did the trick. Now it's on to the Slackware forums to figure out why XFCE won't start and resolve a few other issues. Then, hopefully, this whole problem can be solved and posted to the success stories...

EDIT:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi....php?p=2410542

I have recently persevered a little with slackware.. invested some time into it.. and I absolutely love it! I'm never going back to the bloated distros like SuSE, Fedora etc.. They're all just so slow compared to Slack.

It's working for me so far...