[ale] Strange happenings, can't boot either CentOS or Fedora core 4 from either disk or CD.

[Jim]

This is a strange box anyway, I bought it from Monarch a while back,
just a case, memory and a mb/cpu.  It's a A7V600 model.  Initially it
didn't find either my 30 Gb hard drive or the ancient CDROM drive.  It
did find a 20 G and a 40 G, so I just swapped drive around and bought a
DVD writer for it.  I went out and bought a dual core Intel MB this
weekend, and took the A7V600 and put it in an older box replacing a 600
Mhz Celeron board.  It didn't like that CDROM either plus it wouldn't
boot FC4.  I figured I'd have to reinstall FC4 but couldn't because the
CD drive wasn't being found.  By the way, that was the BIOS that didn't
find it no matter what I did.  Same for the 30 G drive.

Anyway, I have both a FC4 and CentOS CD and neither of them boot.  It
gets to the boot: line, I hit enter and it loads linuz, initrd,  clears
the screen and ...  nothing.  Same as the disk image.  I tried adding
the acpi=off and debug to the boot line, but it didn't help.

This is a multiboot system.  It had two flavors of SuSE and maybe two of
Debian, but for sure one.  In all those systems it works fine, after I
corrected the strange drive mapping this system did for me. It also
boots Knoppix since that's how I fixed the menu.lst and fstabs before I
got the OSs working that I did.

Anyway does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Jim.