Well, I've tried installing several distros in the past, and I don't think they hung up like this, but I suspect that since I moved all of my stuff into a new case, the errors I'm getting are from that. Currently, my harddrive is running as an IDE slave and my CD/DVD drive is running as IDE master. I've tried multiple things to switch these out, and Windows works just fine like this, but Linux doesn't appear to like it. It hangs up xUbuntu / kUbuntu on the "Mounting Root File System" step, and when I tried PC-BSD, it failed finding cd0 multiple times.

Do I need to play with my jumpers, or is there a way around this? Thanks for the help in advance

That would be my first suggestion. The HDD should always be master and CD/DVD slave in a one-on-one configuration. You can still program BIOS to boot from CD first.

It still boots into the distro's installer, or at least part of the way into it. That's not my problem. My problem is that it and other distros refuse to mount their filesystems to do anything else.

Not good... We'll need a lot more info to try to help.

Post a list of your hardware, especially motherboard type, CPU type & speed, RAM, HDD brand & size, & CD brand & speed.

Also, tell us exactly what happens during install, in particular, error messages (if any)...

No error messages for xUbuntu / kUbuntu, simply hangs up for several minutes on the "Mounting File System" portion of its boot screen. In PC-BSD, it says it timed out when trying to find cd0 about 6 times.

My harddrive came with an old computer, I don't have any specs / manuals for it, so no real help there. The size on it is 160GB. Motherboard is an ASUS P5GL-MX-UAYZ (very hard to find support for, it seems), Pentium 4 3.0GHz LGA775, and the RAM is 1GB of Corsair DDR high performance RAM.

Open bios. Goto IDE config. Change to s-ata. I had it set to both s-ata and p-ata and had the same problem

This is a bit simplistic, but it might help:

Are you sure the ide cables are inserted correctly into the m/board? The HDD should be Primary Master and the first CDrom as Secondary Master. You might have to reset the jumpers or just replace the cables for the cdrom to show up.

Just a thought.