good_ol_dv

I've run into problems installing linux. I first tried Mandrake 10.1 but right after the first screen when you push enter to install it locks up with a blue bar at the top and bottom. The bottom says something like <Alt+F1 for here> and a few other options. Hitting any key combo it has on the bottom does nothing. I then tried SuSe 9.2 this also locks up. This locks up when it says initializing hardware. I have disabled alot of things on the motherboard and disconnected alot of extra cards. Tried to isolate exactly what piece of hardware was making it freeze. Nothing worked. Any ideas? My system specs: MSI 865PE Neo2-FIS2R Motherboard Intel Pentium 4 2.8C 2-512MB Corsair XMS DDR400 memory (1 GB) ATI Radeon 9000 series (64MB DDR) The motherboard has a SATA/RAID controller. Also has one additional IDE onboard (think it's a Promise controller)

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