hardware problem when installing slack
 

Greetings, I just bought a new hard disk today and thought I'd add the 10.1 distribution to my computer. Unfortunatelly, after some trouble and system re-building the system seems to be working fine with the previous hard disk (which has winxp on it) and shows the new hard disk (a western digital 120gb) as not initialized.
Now when I tried installing slack 10.1 a couple of times the system hung right after the line:

Real Time Clock Driver v1.10f

Right underneath was the cursor blinking. No keys could be pressed no nothing.
I've also tried to install SuSE but the system hangs even before I get to see any info (press esc to see information, but pressing it doesn't do anything)

Weird thing is this noon, before all this, I added the disk and tried to install SuSE. I was at the point of selecting packages, when I saw it had no apache, so I thought I'd install slack. When I rebooted, the bios failed to find both hard disk on the first ide channel (though it always finds my dvd-rw on the second channel) and then I started moving, removing and changing things. Now the system is as before, but I can't load the kernel. Any ideas? Thanks for reading this and sorry for the long post.

PS: I'm starting to think that it's not the new hard disk's fault. I've created a small partition in windows and started using it. It seems fine. But why the heck won't a linux kernel load?
I should add that I had a faulty northbridge fan (I've no idea since when, but the system was stable) but got it replaced today.

Perhaps you should check your HD jumpers?

loose power connectors?

Well, thanks for the tries, but it had nothing to do with it. I found some slack boot up screens and what seemed to follow after the real time clock driver, was the floppy. Then I thought...wait, but I've disabled the floppy from the bios. That was it, when I re-enabled it (even though there's no physical floppy device in the pc) the kernel loaded right away. But it's rather weird isn't it? I mean 2 mainstream linux distributions halting because I've disabled the floppy from the bios? Nowadays that pc's without a floppy are more common I feel this should be corrected.
Now, I'll have to spend the next few days configuring my machine, but hopefully my hardware should keep going for a few years more. ;)

good problem-solving. too bad that all scrolls off the top of the screen within a quarter of a second, I might have actually known that otherwise.