My troubles installing LINUX

[rhofland at gis.net (Randall Hofland)]

FYI Update on LINUX installs;

    I was able to fully install Mandrake 7 to the hard drive of my
server box (Supermicro P6DLS boards with dual Celeron @ 525 MHz, 128 Mb
DIMMs CAS L2) and then exit the install and reboot. The machine freezes
with a screen that is blank except for a "g" at the bottom left. I have
not been able to configure X because of issues with using an old PS2 VGA
monitor despite setting the X configurations within the acceptable range
(but I don't really need X on the server anyways). Unlike my install
issues with SuSE where it usually does not get through LILO, this freeze
is beyond the LILO boot.
    I am now suspecting a hardware issue on the motherboards but can't
figure out what can be the problem. The SCSI drive is properly
configured as a boot device in Bios and the Adaptec drivers for the on
board UW-SCSI seem to boot up via the BIOS installation as well. I have
not discovered any obvious points of contention during my explorations
of the BIOS and SCSI utilities. My only real concern is that either my
running the bus at 75 rather than 66 MHz causes some data errors
(unlikely since I have have already tried loading SuSE at the 66MHz
setting) or that the DIMMs have some sort of configuration problem (BIOS
is set to autodetect but I have also tried manually setting to CAS L2 or
L3).The one thing I have not done with this board (but did with another
problem child) was to update the BIOS to detect faster CPU speeds.
    This is truely making me crazy. Please give me some idea what I need
to look for.

Thanks!

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