Failure to install OS - not booting from bootable cds

[mrs_whiskerson]

I've built a new pc, and up to a certain point all was going according to plan. Hardware all in and giving all appearances of working (as in nothing obviously doing nothing at all), everything in the BIOS looking ok. Nice new SATA hard drive, successfully formatted and partitioned using CD that came with it.

Was planning on installing Win 2k for now. In a few weeks time I'll probably be changing and having a go with Ubuntu server, but anyway...

I cannot boot from the Windows 2000 disc at all. If I only allow it to boot from the optical drive it tells me to insert bootable media and try again. If I have boot sequence set to floppy, optical, hard drive I will get an NTLDR missing error.

I have tried with a Windows 95 CD (to see what would happen, not because I have any intention of using 95) and that's the same. I've also tried XP Home Edition, which is slightly better - it will boot from the CD and gets to 18% and then freezes. Then tried Ubuntu Desktop CD. I get a kernel panic error from this.

I was able to boot from the driver disc for the hard drive and from MemTest86+ (no errors in 14 hours). I have tried swapping out the optical drive. I swapped out the hard drive for a 4.3Gb IDE I had spare (SATA drive back in now). I've swapped out the graphics card and that's not made a difference.

I tried loading optimised defaults in bios, no go, tried fail-safe defaults, still no go.

The kernel panic message I'm getting from Ubuntu is:

[4294670.404000] Call Trace:
[4294670.404000] [<c0117116>] __ioremap+0xb6/0xf0
[4294670.404000] [<c01f6e08>] acpi_os_map_memory+0x59/0x6f
[4294670.404000] [<c0208e90>] acpi_tb_get_this_table+0xb1/0x11b
[4294670.404000] [<c0208bd6>] acpi_tb_get_table+0x26/0x5e
[4294670.404000] [<c0209113>] acpi_tb_get_table_rdst+0x1f/0x7c
[4294670.404000] [<c020ba73>] acpi_ut_remove_reference+0x21/0x26
[4294670.404000] [<c02038b6>] acpi_ns_root_initialize+0x23e/0x24d
[4294670.404000] [<c01006c0>] name_to_dev_t+0x110/0x2d0
[4294670.404000] [<c02091dc>] acpi_load_tables+0x6c/0X10c
[4294670.404000] [<c01002c0>] init+0x0/0x150
[4294670.404000] [<c039f66e>] acpi_early_init+0x43/0xec
[4294670.404000] [<c01002dd>] init+0x1d/0x150
[4294670.404000] [<c0101385>] kernel_thread_helper+0x5/0x10
[4294670.404000] Code: 5b 5e 5f 5d c3 8d b6 00 00 00 00 8d bc 27 00 00 00 00 31 db f6 05 0d 54 38 c0 20 75 c9 0f 20 d8 0f 22 d8 89 d8 5b 5b 5e 5f 5d c3 <0f> 0b 56 00 74 fa 2f c0 e9 2f ff ff ff 8d 76 00 8d bc 27 00 00
[4294670.404000] <0>Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
[4294670.404000]

That might make more sense to someone else. I haven't had any experience of sorting out Linux, so haven't started down that avenue yet.

My gut feeling is the processor here, but I'm not really basing that on anything.

If anyone can provide any insight or suggest other things to test it would be very much appreciated - I'm going up the wall with this now!

Anna