[H-GEN] new system hanging at boot from kernel

[Troy Piggins]

G'day all,

I have built myself a new home server, but am having a problem that I can't
figure out when I try to install linux on it and hoping you can point me in the
right direction.  The case, motherboard, cpu, and ram are all brand new.  The
mb has one IDE slot and 4 SATAs.

Attempt 1: I took my previous installation's IDE hdd and plugged that into the
above as that would've been the simplest solution.  Bios and grub all loaded
fine, just as ubuntu (dapper) started going through it's startup it hanged at
the loading kernel message.  I had to hard power down.

Attempt 2: I unplugged the IDE hdd, plugged in a brand new SATA hdd
unformatted, and a IDE cdrom with a thought of installing ubuntu from scratch.
Got thru bios and the initial ubuntu install cd's menu where it gives choices
of what you want to do.  Chose install and got a one line message saying
"... booting from kernel" and it just hangs again.

Attempt 3: Same as 2 above but tried gentoo minimal install cd.  Seemed to get
further where gentoo was detecting hardware, but then just after it mounted the
/dev/sda, there was a message that it was mounting /dev/hdd and it just hanged
there.

Any ideas?

/dev/hdd would be an ide hdd?  but there was nothing plugged in except the
cdrom.  And it worked because it was trying to install from it?

Couldn't be corrupt cd's because I tried several.

I scimped a bit on the ram - albatron 1gb generic for $30 or something.  Could
that be it?  I would've thought it would give mb error beep codes if that was
faulty.

What am I missing?

-- 
Troy Piggins