PC: P4 2.4Ghz (800Mhz FSB), ASUS P4P800, ATI Radeon 9500 Pro, 1Gb RAM, 120+80Gb WD HDD w/8mb cache, Toshiba 16x DVD, ASUS 52x CD-RW, USB mouse, PS/2 keyboard.

My friend and I were able to partially install Gentoo before realizing that the filesystem had become badly truncated (sh code appeared in /etc/passwd, mtab was all screwed up, etc.), and we wanted to know whether this was my system (specifically the 80Gb drive we installed it to) or a matter of us not currectly umounting the filesystem when we rebooted.

So I'm trying to install RH9 or Suse8.2. Both installations fail after they enumerate my ide devices.

RH9 fails after the following lines (Suse fails at the same place, but I don't have the exact text that it spits out before failing):

ide0 at 0xefe0-0xefe7,0xefae irq5
ide1 at 0xefe0-0xefe7,0xefaa irq5

This is right after it runs through what hda-hdd are.

I've tried giving the following arguments to the installer: nofirewire, nousb, ide=nodma, text, apm=off, and nothing seems to change.

Any help/insight would be greatly appreciated.

Try disable serial ata from bios :-)

Try 'noapic' as an argument to the installer (as well as apm=off).

Second thoughts... Your motherboard is quite recent, so you might be better off with 'acpi=off' rather than 'apm=off'.

I have recently purchased a similar system. I have had no problems installing both Red Hat 9.0 and Libranet (Debian package) 2.8, but did have some issues with the built in LAN and Audio.

I would first suggest upgrading your BIOS to 1008 from ASUS, and then look carefully at all of the BIOS settings, disabling anything that you are not using (1394, extra USB, RAID etc.).

Start with a Windows install, and see if you still experience problems there.

I haven't paid much attention to the boot process when installing, but the two IDE interfaces being identical does not seem right. Which of the IDE controllers are you using?

Turn off RAID if you have it configured in the BIOS.

Once you get your distro installed, there will be some fun with drivers for the 3c2000 NIC, and the audio.

Good luck!