I bought an ECS Elitegroup RS480-M motherboard with Athalon 64 chip and installed the 32 bit SUSE 9.3 operating system on it. During installation I got a message "Cool Computer, but do you really want to install a 32 bit system on a 64 bit machine?". Since I didn't know where to find the 64 bit system I went ahead and installed the 32 bit system. The computer worked perfectly with the 32 bit system installed.

A week later I found the 64 bit system on Side B of the DVD (At least I think that's where it is- why no mention of this in the SUSE docs?). I get the "Cool Computer but...." message when I boot from side A of the DVD but not when I boot from side B. I deleted the disk partitions prior to installing the 64 bit system from side B of the DVD. The installation menu comes up and I select any of the install options, the system loads the Linux kernal and then the video screen goes blank and never recovers.

I downloaded and burned a CD with the MAXBLAST software from Maxtor which boots up in DR DOS from the CD and then blanks the video screen. I tried an old Slackware CD that did the same thing. I tried my wife's Windows 98 installation CD, this DOES NOT blank the video screen, I actually got most of the way into the Windows installation before I quit for the night.

The CLEAR_CMOS jumper was set to the CLEAR position (and left overnight) but the problem was not corrected. The hard drive has been disconnected, but the problem still exists. A video capture card was plugged into the PCI slot and the monitor plugged into its VGA socket but this card also goes blank just after the kernal loads.

Any Ideas?

have you tried to set the video BEFORE it boots (ie on the kernel line)?