I put the new board listed above in my pre-existing Suse 10.1 box. The only differences between this board and my old one (an EliteGroup P4VXASD2+) is an extra PCI slot and two SATA ports (in addition to the two standard IDE ports). The new card's bios recognized all my IDE drives, and GRUB went smoothly. However, once Suse began booting, it was unable to find any PnP devices or my hda1(swap) and hda2(/) partitions. The system then halted.

I popped a knoppix live CD in and tried booting from that and everything worked perfectly. I was able to mount, and access files on, all my partitions with no errors.

So I popped in my Suse install DVD and ran the automatic system check. This seemed to go fine, finding all my partitions (valid boot partition, etc.) but encountered a segmentation fault when it tried to check what software was installed on the system. (Not sure if this was just a quirk with the DVD or something more serious) However, since the tools found all my partitions, before eventually crashing, why aren't they found during boot?

The system kicks me into a shell, so thought I'd run dmesg to see what came up but it gave me 'command not found'