AMD64 3000+
512 DDR 400
Asrock K8S8X
sis 964
Maxtor 6 160MO 160GB SATA HDD
Nvidia (PNY) GeForce FX5200
NU DVDRW DDW-081

Surfed and read for approx 8 hours, must post now.

Mandrake: Hangs on hard drive search, tried "linux noapic"
and "acpi=off",
no good.

Debian hangs, around same stage, cant quite remember messages,

Suse recognises sis 180 controller and seems to hang while loading it...
Mouse and keyboard not locked up or anything.

Windows XP installed, two partitions for XP, @100GB and 30GB.
Want to get rid of winblows so bad. installed linux previously fine on previous boxes (not as new as this one), any suggestions?

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

Used an ide 10gb drive, all three versions work, suse finishing off at the moment. m

andrake had issue with modem, could not install with some error (old serial port hardware modem, working ok with XP) tried to install other packages today but it would not recognise the DVD as the disk from which to install the rpm's from.

All files were on the dvd and were able to be read, and yesterday I installed modules fine...oh well, I'll see what suse does.

It (mandrake) did recognise the SATA controller in the hardware configuration screen, but not the drive.

Cheers...
Anyone out there?