Tried Mepis
Started giving a whole bunch of messages though:
Disabling IRQ #10
irq 10: nobody cared!
So i checked the system information screen that's on very briefly after the bios and all the integrated components were set to that (IDE, S-ATA, Firewire, USB)
So I started to check around in those settings, on the IDE I changed it from Native mode to Legacy Mode.
Just changing that got rid of all the irq 10 errors and I was able to get into Mepis.
Tried Mandrake install again but still ran into the same problems.
But this one thing made me curious to how much it could just be related to the motherboard components and bios itself.
So I did something I should have thought of doing before.
My board is a MSI with AMI BIOS. I used MSI's live update tool to update the mainboard drivers, bios, etc..
After I flashed it, tried it again and it worked!
Haven't actually installed it yet, but perhaps will tomorrow.
Thanks for all the suggestions. Using Mepis and it giving me that error lead me on the correct path to finding the source of the problem