With every distro of linux I try to load on my system I have the same problem. ACPI crashes the computer. On the rare occasions I have been able to get a distro loaded the xserver crashs until I can get ACPI disabled.

Now I figure with the number of people running Linux on all sorts of hardware I can't be the only poor sap having this problem so I am looking for some help solving it.

My hardware is
Gigabyte GA-K8NS Motherboard
AMD athalon 64 3200+ processor
Saphire ATI Radeon 9250 Graphics card
Coolermaster Centurion case

I have tried to install Redhat, Debian Lenny and Mandriva 2007 and 2008 and can only get mandriva to run.

Any Ideas

What do you mean by "crashes the computer"? What do you see on screen?

Some motherboards have problem booting sata drives. Some have option in bios to have sata drives operate in ide mode. Maybe you can try this.

I mean that the computer freezes totally, the sound card echos, the mouse won't move and i have to do a cold boot. I cant even ctl alt backspace to kill the x server.

I have one hdd on the system when I do an install it is ide. Other than that I have the network and sound onboard and the rest as described above.