I'll throw in my two cents worth :

twisted: do you have the same problem with both lilo and grub HD installs? Have you tried disabling any antivirus protection in the bios ( I think the ASUS board might have such)

I have a ASUS A7VM266 with an older maxtor drive that can only seem to hd install lilo - go figure.

Kanotix and Mepis have grub (no joy), the last knoppix I installed (2.6 ) installed ok with lilo.

Keep in mind that once you have installed the distro you prefer to the HD, boot loader issues can be addressed by booting from CD, then chrooting into the HD partition and trying different grub/lilo things. OTH, qtparted might not be the best partitioning tool out there, try an older knoppix that uses cfdisk for partitioning if you can. Or run cfdisk, or fdisk from a live CD after install..

Two cents and worth every penny. HTH