listen very carefully to the power on self-test (POST) beep code.
 
are you sure it's three beeps? or is it one long beep followed by two shorter beeps?
 
have a look at what I believe is the appropriate beep code table for the BIOS
in your ASUS A7V600 motherboard: http://bioscentral.com/beepcodes/awardbeep.htm
 
It would seem you're not having disc problems, but are having a hardware problem.

Check jumper settings, with CS setting there must be matching cable. Also try clearing CMOS.

Before you get too involved into a hardware issue (which is possible), suspect the media as at fault.
 
Take a look at my draft ISO burning guide.
 
The critical thing is the speed that you burned the cd disks at.
 
Also, the A7V600-X has a feature that reboots the system (clears the system) when a power failure or interruption occurs, say when the system crashes due to a system problem. If the disks are bad or the iso faulty, causing the system to crash, this can happen.
 
What media are you using? Did you burn the iso images at a slow speed?

Thanks for the replies, I was pretty carefull listening at first to the beep codes and I verified again it is 3 quick short beeps, is there any good place that I could look up the beep codes, cause the link martouf posted hardly has any codes and doesn't have mine. Anyway I took the advise of clearing CMOS, actually just updated the BIOS since is so easy, and the media now works perfectly (I have no idea how that fixed it but hopefully that is over now, I am usually one that never updates BIOS unless i know I NEED to)
 
However now I feel quite stupid and am getting fed up with it cause now after appering to succefully install, on boot up I get:
 
GRUB loading.read error
 
I kept all the original suggested automatic partitioning hoping that I wouldn't have problems like this. Is the drive just failing (which I doubt cause just had fedora 3 installed on it) or is it some kind of chipset drivers that are not right/compatible?
 
Any more ideas?
 

Quote:I kept all the original suggested automatic partitioning hoping that I wouldn't have problems like this. Is the drive just failing (which I doubt cause just had fedora 3 installed on it)

First, stop making all these changes to your system it's no wonder that you are having problems.

You updated the bios...got the 3 beep codes, but the system is booting normally now? If so, let's move on with your install.

You tried Mandrake. Did this install at all, or fail at the partitioning section?

You had Fedora Core 3 installed. Did you attempt to install Core 1 over the Core 3 installation, or wipe the drive and start the install of Core 1 and just tell it to accept default partitioning?

Do you have Windows on this system at all, or just Linux? If Windows, is the Windows install XP using the NTFS filesystem?

Do you have a sata drive on this system, or ide; or a combination of the two?

Grub is failing because it can't read the disk partition. If you had failed prior or successful installs and tried to over-write the partition each time (did not re-format) this can be a problem.

Grub may not be reading stage 1.5 or 2 correctly because of the partition confusion on each install, how did you set up the bootloader? Did you tell the Fedora Core 1 install to over-write the MBR?

Quote:You updated the bios...got the 3 beep codes, but the system is booting normally now? If so, let's move on with your install.
yes, system seems to be fine now

Quote:You tried Mandrake. Did this install at all, or fail at the partitioning section?
Mandrake had similar 3 beep code crash, I could try installing Mandrake once again now that that problem seems to be fixed (does 10.1 use a 2.4 kernel, I'm not sure but I thought somewhere said it did [<2.4.22 is preferable])

Quote:You had Fedora Core 3 installed. Did you attempt to install Core 1 over the Core 3 installation, or wipe the drive and start the install of Core 1 and just tell it to accept default partitioning?
yes, the drive was wiped out, fc3 used completely different partitioning and fc1 formated all the newly created partitions

Quote:Do you have Windows on this system at all, or just Linux? If Windows, is the Windows install XP using the NTFS filesystem?
Yes, I do have an XP installed on one drive and surprisingly that has been reliable during all of this. I have all different OSs on their own didicated drive, I have 8 drives floating around which I nomilly run 5 at a time along with 3 CD drives. During all this messing around I have anywhere from 1 to 5 plugged in (good thing I have 500Watt PS and many power and IDE cables, cause I have drives laying all over swithcing between them)

Quote:Do you have a sata drive on this system, or ide; or a combination of the two?
All my drives are IDE, however I do have sata on mb

Quote:Grub is failing because it can't read the disk partition. If you had failed prior or successful installs and tried to over-write the partition each time (did not re-format) this can be a problem.
I have reformated the partitions everytime, and since I give the install the complete drive I figured would write the MBR corretly the way it wants to, and since it does start loading GRUB I figure it doesn't have a problem reading its own partition.

Quote:Grub may not be reading stage 1.5 or 2 correctly because of the partition confusion on each install, how did you set up the bootloader? Did you tell the Fedora Core 1 install to over-write the MBR?
Sorry, I remembered the message wrong, it is: GRUB loading statge2.read error
So it is stage 2 if that helps

One note that I also thought of now too is that some of the installations would seem to mix up my drives. I would normally plug the drive I'm installing an OS into the mb primary master, which I would think would be hda, but sometimes shows up as hde which would be my IDE PCI card primary master. All the fc installs I think were always as hda though.

I tried booting from a fc3 install, where grub works to the fc1 and works fine

hope this gives you a better idea

Oh, and also I tried SuSE 8.1 now too and does the same as fc1 with the GRUB loading stage2readerror