FWIW, I have Mandrake 9.2 running w/o problems on my a7n8x-dlx. 9.1
was a bit of a pain due to the lack of Nvidia drivers, but it did
load. I'm using a 40G WD HD for Linux. My system is dual boot, and
win2k boots from a Maxtor 60G HD. A freeze while partitioning and
formatting sounds bad, like a hardware failure, have you done any
tests? Temps look ok? Voltages look OK in BIOS? Have you tried to
install any other OS on the Maxtor HD with the same hardware (e.g.,
win2k)?

What specific errors are you encountering? You mention Mandrake 9.1
and 9.2 gives you errors in your post. Specificity is prized when you
are looking for help with a computer problem.
--
Best regards,
Kyle
wrote in message
...
| Hi all,
|
| I'm getting a bit desperate about the following problem, hopefully
| someone could point me into the right direction:
|
| I'm not a computer hardware expert, but I usually am capable enough
to
| build my own PC with the components I prefer. Friday last week I
| bought new components for my PC. My system is dual bootable
| (win2000/mandrake 9.2). In my new setup linux seems to give problems
| with my HDD. It freezes with partitioning/formatting. The particular
| HDD gives no problems with my old PC. While starting up the
computer,
| I noticed my extra Promise UDMA133 controller usues the same IRQ
| (IRQ11) as the USB controller *and* display controller. IMO this
seems
| like conflicting hardware. However, I installed win2k at another
80GB
| Maxtor HDD with the very same Promise controller without any
problems.
| I tried to reserve IRQ11 in the BIOS, but when I do this the PC
| assigns all above mentioned devices to IRQ5. I tried the Promise
card
| in another PCI slot without results.
|
| As I said before, in my old PC this HDD performs well, linux
installs
| just fine. However, when I do this and move the HDD to my new PC, it
| will boot linux eventually, but it will crash at a moment for
certain.
|
| I removed the Promise UDMA133 controller and used only the onboard
| UDMA133 controller. Partitioned and formatted the linux HDD and now
| linux would even install correctly, but after some time it will
freeze
| and ruin the user account permanently.
|
| My old system: 230W noname PSU / Asus P2B-F (BX) / 1GHz Celeron
| (Cu-mine) / 512MB PC100 / 3x Maxtor 80GB / GeForce2 / Promise
UDMA133
| / onboard DMA33 / DVD-ROM / DVD-RW / FDD. DVD players at the onboard
| controller, 2x win HDD at Promise IDE1, 1x linux HDD at Promise
IDE2.
|
| New system: 350W Aopen PSU / Asus A7N8X-X (nForce2) / Athlon 2500 /
| 512MB PC3200 / 3x Maxtor 80GB / GeForce2 / Promise UDMA133 / onboard
| UDMA133 / DVD-ROM / DVD-RW / FDD.
|
| I'm a bit lost now. I flashed the BIOS to 1007 and disabeled APIC in
the BIOS,
| no improvement at all. I was thinking that linux gives problems for
some
| reason with the nForce 2 chipset, since win2k installs and runs
| without any problems. Could this be? Has anyone compareble
| experiences? If so, how were these problems solved? Is it a Mandrake
| specific problem? For the time being I didn't try another distro,
| although both Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 gave the same errors :-( All
| feedback is highly appreciated!
|
| Regards,
| Chris
|
|