Comrades hello!

1. Noobie already running WinXP on Asus A78NX-x with AMD AthlonXP 2200+, 1.5Gb RAM, sb live! 5.1, ati radeon 9600, WD80Gb HDD w/ 8mb cache.

2. Partitioned 15Gb as ext2; 2Gb as fat32; 1.5Gb as linux swap. Installed FC5 with bundled Anaconda on ext2. Install 'successful'.

3. Reboot. FC5 bootloader comes up with winxp/fc5 choice. Choose FC5.

4. linux kernel appears to boot ok. Then...

5. 'starting udev'; pause. Then klingon/hexadecimal spat at me: see screenshot www njallan com/pic1.jpg Followed by 'continuing in 120 seconds'.

6. Patience... then more 'unintelligible' output: www njallan com/pic2.jpg. something to do with IRQs? system then hangs.

7. I reboot. I go to bios and disable 'usb legacy support' and 'apic'. This does not help; there is no difference on boot to FC5.

8. I enter ('pass'?) a command at the command line before boot: see www njallan com/pic3.jpg. I delete 'rhgb quiet' and type 'noacpi'. I then unplug all usb devices. I then boot.

9. system hangs again, as before.

What to do? I wanna be a 'Linux comrade'. sorry if i've broken a url policy to get you those screenshots.

The image looks like a kernel panic to me.

The idea of a kernel panic is interesting -

I unplugged my slave hard drive and attempted to boot with the master HDD only - the system did not like that at all, and it got me thinking that my master boot record is on my slave drive (it was my first HDD a long time ago). How does one find out where the MBR is stored?

Both my HDDs are IDE on the same ribbon cable.

Google doesn't seem to turn up much on kernel panic and a7n8x-x motherboards.