I tried booting a liveCD of GPARTED and puppy linux. GPARTED identifies the drives and the partitions but loops for about 10 minutes, then says "This Debian Session Did not boot." Puppy Linux takes like 5 minutes at "Booting the Kernel..." and then another 5 minutes at "Loading the drivers for the disk drives...". However, puppy did eventually boot and found all of the drives. Puppy and Gparted used to take like 10 seconds to boot, same hard drive, ram, procc, etc, only a new motherboard.

Windows XP boots fine, detects all drives. However, if I leave the linux CD's in the drive when it boots, it won't make it to the "Welcome" screen.


I used to have an ASUS board that had the same ram/processor/hard drives, it would boot XP and linux fine.


I have a G45M-S Foxconn board now. I also have the IDE to SATA converters for the CD drives and one of the hard drives.

Hard drive setup:
1 TB
sda 1 - 50 GB, windows XP
sda 2 - 25 GB, for future vista
< extended
sda 3 - 25 GB, ext3 for future linux
sda 4 - 25 GB, ext3 for future linux
sda 5 - 10 GB for testing old OS, blank at the moment
>
sda 6 - 750 GB, data/games

320 GB
sdb1 - data

Thanks for replies.

Best guess would be that it is not the motherboard but the ide/sata converters that are causing the issue.

Well, I have heard that Foxconn doesn't have the best reputation in terms of linux support. I remember an incident last year when a Ubuntu user inspected the BIOS of has (malfunctioning) Foxconn board. Foxconn cased the close stating that "his operating system was not supported"; then they turned round when said person published his account in the ubuntu community forums.
http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums....d.php?t=869249