I don't know what's happening any more. I keep getting these strange errors having to do with my IDE settings. After scouring my BIOS, I still have yet to come up with a proper fix, or something.

I'm running on an older P166 on a Tyan Tomcat III board, with 64 MB of memory. It's got a 6.4g Quantum hard drive on primary master, and a Sanyo 16x CD on the secondary master. Both the hard drive and the CD are set up correctly. I'm attempting to set up Red Hat 6.2, which is the scond copy of Red Hat I've tried. I'm sure there's other distribs, but that's just what I picked up.
The installer goes up great. Really fast, no problems, starts off, goes all the way through with no problems. I do the install, set it up all nice and great. Here's my partitions:

64m swap
75m /tmp
75m /var
2500m /home
2000m /usr
grow / (set to 1, "grow to fill disk")

so, after going through the custom setup, it gets to the end, where you're given the chance to set up a boot disk. Usually, when I specify to make a boot disk, the installer freezes right there. Could be another symptom. Ok, so, if you skip the boot disk, then it gives you the "reset and give it a go!" screen. You click the exit button, it spits the CD out at you and reboots.
It all goes fine, but about a third of the way into the startup messages I get:

ENABLING IO-APICS IRQs
... changing IO-APIC physical APIC ID to 2
kernel panic: could not set ID
Io swapper task - not syncing

and it freezes. Doesn't do a single thing, except I think it does the normal "turn off the screen" thing later. When I tried installing on Red Hat 6.0, it would usually choke and die when it started going after my IDE settings. I can only assume that this current error and my old error are the same thing. In 6.0, it would have trouble finding my hard drive, then absolutely just fail at trying to detect my CD-ROM.
The wierd thing is, the installer detects all of my settings correctly. I can go to lilo and tell it to boot up in linux-up, and it will go fine. I think that linux-up is the installer though, so that won't work. I tried booting directly to the partition, thinking that was it. No dice, still.
I'm at wits end here. Has anyone ever had this kind of error before? Any suggestions, comments, stuff like that? And please don't be a cheese head and just tell me to "check your settings again". I've already done that more than once, so that won't help. Thanks!

Tim