I have a pc that was running WinXP for years until some power surge issues corrupted the install. Since then, I've been trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 on the machine and have yet to be successful. I'm using a new hard drive as the one that was in the system before seemed to be having problems. I also removed the video card from the system and have just been trying to use the built-in video on the motherboard.

I downloaded an .iso of Ubuntu 10.10 and when I boot off the cd, everything seems to be ok. Once it gets to the desktop and gives the option to install, I can select this and go through all the steps with no problems. The install appears to work fine and when complete, I restart the system and try to login. Every time, as soon as I enter my password and click to login, the system hangs. Generally when it hangs, the mouse will become unresponsive, the desktop background will go black, though the cursor is still there, and the caps lock/scroll lock lights on the keyboard will just start flashing.

I've also tried including software updates during the install process, and when I've done this, the install hangs before completing. The only hardware in the system is the mobo which is including the video I'm using, an AMD Athlon(TM) 64
X2 4200+ dual-core - 2.2GHz, a sound card, 2gb ddr2 ram, a 500gb sata hard drive that's never been used before, and an dvd-rw drive. Any help getting this to work would be greatly appreciated.

Greetingz!

Sounds like you have a hardware problem. A dead give-away would be two easy questions;
a) Has there recently been any thunderstorms in your area (over the past few weeks or month)?
b) Was this system on a known-good surge suppressor or UPS?

No? Well, go out and buy one. I've seen quite a few people treat computers like toasters; they just plug 'em in and hit buttons.
Surge suppressors and Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS) are made and sold for a reason.

With that said;
1) Grab a KNOPPIX cd.
Boot it, everything look cool, or did it hang, too? HardWare Problem.
2) Grab a memtest86+ ISO
Boot it, everything look cool? No. RAM problem.

Not recently, but a couple months ago, yes, that's what led to the WinXP install being corrupted. No, it wasn't on a UPS, and I'm well aware that it should be. We have very little thunderstorm activity where I live and got complacent about ever getting one (I have one now that I'll use if this system ever works again).

As far as Knoppix goes, what good will booting off a Knoppix cd do? I can boot off the Ubuntu cd with no problem. It's actually trying to install and then run when I see this problem. I'll give memtest a try. I've run it long ago on this ram, but I suppose it's always worth another shot.

For shame, we're going to have to call the Geek Squad on you. Not the friendly one, either.

Little thunderstorm activity isn't really a deciding factor. A drunk slamming into a power transformer can blow out most of a block (had it happen myself).

Knoppix auto-detects hardware and "adjusts" itself to your system. If you boot a Knoppix disk on a system, and you still have problems, they're hardware-related. I've used Knoppix to "troubleshoot" windows boxen for half a decade.
I used Knoppix in response to Dell's "Oh, just reinstall windows!" answer to everything. I point out "Yeah, the ___ card is still busted with a different OS running."

No offense, but it's Ubuntu for crying out loud. Booting any Linux distro is one thing, taxing system resources that might have a problem is entirely different.

Case in point.

That was before a lighting-strike/power-surge/brownout hit the system. I personally wouldn't trust that hardware until everything from the power-supply to the RAM to the CPU were stress-tested. If your RAM and CPU show signs of problems, scrap the Mobo & everything on it.
The hard drives and optical (CD/DVD) drives might have made it unscathed.

Good Luck, and there's always NewEgg.com if you need cheap replacement parts.

Well thus far memtest is coming through with no errors (3 full runs), but I guess I can leave it running for a while longer just to be sure on that. I don't mean to come off sounding like I don't believe you on Knoppix, I'm just not overly experienced in running linux on my own systems, so I don't really know the difference in the different distributions. Frankly I was trying Ubuntu since it seems to be popular these days.

I'm assuming the optical drive is ok post power problems, and the hard drive as well since I'm using the new one. The ram seems fine as well, so I'm sort of left with power supply, mobo, and CPU as culprits. I'll give Knoppix a try and see what happens. Anything in particular I should be looking for with it?

Boot it, use it to browse the web, do something CPU/RAM intensive. Keep an eye on /var/adm/messages (or /var/log/messages), and your "dmesg" output.

Maybe stress the HDD with a "dd if=/dev/sd# of=/dev/null"

Well, I don't know what this really means, but it probably took about 10 boot attempts before it actually made it in to the gui desktop on Knoppix. Once in, trying to do anything resulted in the system just freezing up.

I've also had it freeze up and stop during the "Starting hardware abstraction layer" portion of the System Setup. I don't really have a good way of providing the output from this, but this is part of it:

Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt
Pid: 0, comm: swapper Tainted: G D 2.6.36.1 #10

Any ideas, or has this system had it?

Also, this last attempt I pulled the sound card out of the system, but it still had the same issues, so even if the sound card is bad, it doesn't seem like that's the underlying problem.

I've seen it a few times, but it's really rare that a Sound Card would cause a system to freak-out.
Try the following;

a) Have onboard video & a separate video card?
Rip out the separate video card (make sure the BIOS knows you want the onboard!)
b) Have more than 1 stick of RAM?
Rip out the extras, boot. Still have a problem? Swap the stick out with another one.
c) Try under-clocking the CPU.
If it's been damaged, this might work.
d) How's the CPU heatsink & fan?
Dirty? Might be time to clean it. Don't forget the thermal paste!

Already tried it. The separate video card was the first thing I pulled. Also verified that the BIOS is set for onboard.

The 2gb of ram is split up as 2 512mb sticks and a 1gb stick. Tried each by itself, tried the 2 512s together, and of course all 3 together, same result every time.

My BIOS is locked down and I don't have the option to change anything on it besides boot order and things like onboard video vs. a separate video card.

The heatsink and fan actually look good. I cleaned things up inside the case when I last moved the system which wasn't long ago, but I did make sure everything was still good.

Any way you can boot to console level only? I'd like to see the rest of the syslog output.

Xeleema is probably right about it being a hardware issue, but we would need to see the rest of syslog to see where that kernel panic starts.

As mentioned, it could be a variety of things, but one that came up often, in a google search on that error, is the network card (NIC). Any way to pull it out / disable in BIOS?

Can't pull the NIC as it's onboard, but I believe I can disable it through the BIOS. I can give that a try tonight when I get home.

As far as booting to console only, how would I go about doing this when booting off a Knoppix cd? I would gladly provide you more logs, but I don't really know how since the system freezes during startup off the cd.

I believe you type "knoppix failsafe" at the boot prompt. However if you hit Ctrl+F2 (or Ctrl+F3?) you should see a list of options.

What speed did you use to burn?

At login window look at bottom of screen there's a section that says desktop, select failsafe before pressing enter on login.
That'll get you to desktop without freeze up and it's gui.