I am having a problem with a brand new homebuilt system. It is an AMD64 3200 running on an MSI RX480 Neo2 motherboard ( I think that might be a k8n but I'm not positive). I have a generic 80gb ide drive as primary master, a CD on slave, plus two more SATA drives.

In general I have had no luck getting any version of linux to boot. I tried FC4 first, then FC6 because I thought it needed more recent support. I've also tried FreeNAS, a FreeBSD liveCD. They all fail in various ways. I moved to Knoppix because I've had the best luck using it as a troubleshooting tool in the past.

In short, I'm using knoppix LiveCD 5.0.1 and even trying a 'failsafe' install it dies during the initial boot with no real error. Everything looks normal up to the message " VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)" and then it just hangs.

The only other relevant message I get is using FreeNAS, it panics with the message "ACPI: Unable to load the system description tables"

I have tried the BIOS failsafe defaults, removed and disabled SATA, and I've tried every boot parameter like no{acpi|dma|scsi} etc. I think the BIOS is current and I don't think I have any way to reload it anyway, as XP doesn't load either.

I've exhausted everything I think I can do and I'm about to just throw it away and buy a new 939 mobo. Does anyone have any tips about troubleshooting stubborn hardware like this?