Quote Originally Posted by ockham23
No need to throw it away. Kanotix has a good reputation of supporting even problematic hardware and it also has the latest kernel 2.6.18. Here is my advice:
1. Download Kanotix-2006-01-RC4.iso from http://kanotix.com
2. Burn it to cd and copy the iso file to the root directory of any partition on hda. The filesystem can be NTFS or Linux ext2/ext3/reiserfs, but not FAT32.
3. Boot the computer off the cd and append cheatcode fromiso=K*.iso to the line of boot commands at the grub boot screen. As a result, only grub and the kernel image file will be read from the cd, everything else will be extracted from the iso file on the hard drive.

If there's a secondary IDE channel connector on the mainboard, connect the cd-rom drive to it, set it to "master" and try booting again.
It's great to learn about a new tool like Kanotix, so I can have that available to help me troubleshoot. However, my ultimate goal for this particular problem is to figure out how to get a mainstream linux OS on this box (an eventual file server). So I'm more interested in diagnosing what is wrong so I can isolate or correct it.

Thanks again for the tip.