Okay. I'm at a little bit of a loss on this problem, so I welcome any input if anyone has any.

I've been running a small 4 node cluster with Mandrake 9.2. All the computers are the same HW:

AMD Athlon 2400+
Shuttle AN35 Ultra 400 MB
Maxtor 40gig HD
Kingston 333 512mb ram
NVIDIA Quadro4 750XGL
Anstec CDRW 24x52x24
Enermax 465W Whisper PS

About a week ago, I began to upgrade everything to Mandrake 10 official. My installs were stalling at the RPM install portion. In order to fix the problem, I just updated the bios of each machine. I set up one machine exactly as I needed it and since I needed a backup, I thought I'd try Norton Ghost to see how well it handles Mandrake 10. I made an image and ghosted it to a second machine. When restarted, the second machine would always freeze up after the boot screen.

Thinking ghost just did not work right, I tried to install Mandrake 10 straight from the CD's. When I tried to do this, it would stall right when it began loading vmlinuz. I then tried Knoppix 3.3 and Red Hat Fedora Core 2. They froze at the exact same spot. Thinking it might be a hard drive problem cause by ghost, I tried to use a DiskEraser floppy, but since it uses linux, it too froze at the same spot.

Interesting enough, Windows XP installs fine on the system. Hence, it seems to just be a linux issue. I've switched out the power supply and memory to make sure those are fine. I've rolled back the BIOS with no luck, either. I've also tried passing noapic and nolapic, as well as turning apic off in the bios, to no avail.

If you have any ideas or advice, I would be most grateful. Thanks.