I recently upgraded my motherboard and CPU. The new board is an Asus A7N8X-VM. It has sound card and ethernet card integrated into it. I plugged everything up and fired up the system. Everything went well, except it can't find the sound card or ethernet. The network setup wizard says it can't detect the adapter. Any ideas?

you have to goto either http://www.nvidia.com/ or http://www.asus.com/ and get drivers for the nforce chipset

Further experimentation reveals that it doesn't detect any of the peripherals...network adapter, sound card, floppy drive, usb ports.

So I can't get to those sites on my linux box to get the drivers. Okay, I'll get the drivers using another machine, put the drivers on a floppy and...wish that my floppy were detected so that I could install them.

The board came with a CD with drivers for RH and suse, but I have Mandrake. I even tried using the RH drivers. No luck.

I chose an Asus because the manual said that it supports Linux. I called their tech support line every day for two weeks, and every day was told that their techs were busy but would call back without 24 hours. After two weeks no callback ever happened. Today I called back and demanded to be put through to a tech no matter how long I had to wait on hold. After ten minutes I finally got through to a tech support guy who basically said screw you, we're not trained on Linux, even though the board is advertised as supporting Linux.

Whew. Okay, I got that out of my system. But I still want to get this beast working. Any suggestions?

Well, since I've installed on more than 1 nForce system, and the only thing that n-force actually controls is the sound, video, and ethernet. You've got bigger problems if you cant use the floppy drive....

The usb ports probably arent working because they need a good and proper acpi installed, which mandrake is probably making a mess of. Perhaps your particular floppy is usb linked to the board and this could explain that as well...

Find someone with a cd-r and make one of the drivers...