I've tried Ubuntu 5.10, SUSE 10.0, Mandrake 10, and Knoppix but still can't get linux working. Ubuntu, SUSE, and Knoppix all freeze after the boot/install prompt, while Mandrake 10, being so old didn't have my ULi M1575 SATA controller drivers. I was thinking it was because I had an X-Fi card installed, so I removed it only to get the same problem. I tried installing with ACPI off and did safe install in SUSE, but had no luck.

I have an ASUS A8R-MVP with ATI Radeon Xpress200 Crossfire northbridge and ULi M1575 southbridge, 2GB RAM, single ATI X1800XL, Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego, and a Maxtor MaxlineIII 250GB SATA HDD.

Could it be that my chipset is too new? Are there any newer versions of distros that have support for the ATI Chipset?

I appreciate your help.

EDIT: It seems to pass linux tests, which gives me some hope: http://www.linux-tested.com/results/asus_a8r-mvp.html

In such a situation id download memtest86 and check the RAM.

3 passes of memtest86 yielded no errors.

It usually takes some 10 passes to find most. Just leave it on for the night.

Ok, I'll do that tonight. Could it be because I have 4 sticks of memory? It's not running full speed, either, for some reason I can only run it at 167Mhz...

That would seem a pretty probable cause.. Running memory the way it wasn't planned is a very error prone situation..

I tried numerous different 512mhz 1 or 2 stick combinations in dual and single channel modes at full 200Mhz, and saw no differences, it still froze. I guess that rules out a memory problem. I will still try memtest86 again tonight.

12 passes no errors... guess it's not the RAM, then.

When you say -
Athlon 64 3700+ "San Diego" @ 4000+
Do you mean that you are overclocking your CPU from 3700 to 4000?
If so this could cause memory problems especially if you are trying
to overclock the type of memory that you have installed.
Support for your ATI card may be a problem since it is a recent card
and ATI support for Linux is poor.
Support for your Creative sound card could also be a problem since it
is also a new type of card and Creative never help with Linux support.

My sig is old, i copy/pasted from another site I frequent. Nothing on my computer is overclocked anymore...

The lack of support of my new hardware was what I'm worried about... I'm gonna be dissapointed if I can't get it working with this hardware...

Try Gentoo. It uses up to date kernels.

I recommend using PATA hard drives instead of SATA when installing Linux for the first time.

ALSA does not support X-Fi. The Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 has similar sound quality, but it produces more pure sound than Creative Labs sound cards and it is a lot cheaper.

I suggest buying a 3com or Linksys NIC if your on-board NIC does not work.

Try using only a gigabyte of memory.

Probably the kernel is trying to probe the IDE devices but it can only find one drive which is the optical drive. The kernel is waiting for a response from the chipset that may have a very long time out or does not have a time out. Depending where your optical drive is connected. You can include hdX=noprobe for all IDE devices execpt the optical drive. Below is a list for the first IDE controller.

hda = Primary Master
hdb = Primary Slave
hdc = Secondary Master
hdd = Secondary Slave

There are many reasons why is it is not working.

I get the same problem if i try any of these possible solutions... looks like my computer just doesn't like linux... Guess I'm SOL.