Install 5.0 vs. 5.11

I have an MSI 975 motherboard with an Intel Core2 Duo 6700 processor, two SATA 250 GB disks and one 160GB IDE disk, an HP psc2175 printer, DSL modem, and a couple of USB thumb drives. The 160 GB IDE drive is NTSF and has mostly data. One of the 250 GB SATA drives is NTFS formatted and boots Winows XP SP2. The second 250GB SATA drive is intended for a Linux boot. I tried a standard Debian install and got a command line prompt, but it could never get to a GUI as it always said something like"no screens found". So I decided to try Knoppix.

I burned a 5.0 disk, which booted and installed to hard disk flawlessly. Unfortunately, I could not install the printer or mount the SATA NTFS drive.

I burned a 5.1.1 disk (two, actually, a 5.1.0 DVD and a 5.1.1 CD both behave the same). This boots fine and works with all my hardware exactly as I would hope. Trouble is, I can't install it to the SATA HDD. It will partition and format the drive fine, but every time it hangs somewhere during the file copying process.

Anyone here had a similar experience, or know why 5.0 installs so smoothly but 5.1.x hangs? the MD5 checksum on all disks checks fine.

Thanks for any help you can give. (Ich kann auch Deutsch wenn das noeting ist, aber micht besonders gut.)