I have been having way too many problems with windows on my hard drives, for some reason they get corrupted to the point where windows doesn't want to work on them, but it can use them as storage drives. So my next step was SuSE, always perfered linux but I am a gamer.

Anyways, that may be my problem, but I want to make sure Im not doing anything wrong before I got a new hard drive.

SuSE 9.1 installs fine, but I cannot get any form of X to come up. At the end of the configuration/install, when I go to test my graphics setup, the screen goes blank and the monitor goes into standby. In fact, it freezes alltogether. I set the default runlevel to 3, and I can do anything I want from the console.

Hardware:

AMD 64 3200+
2 * 512 Corsair RAM (Their value brand )
K8v SE Deluxe Mobo
2 * Western Digital 80gb SATA drives
Ati 9800 Pro 256mb

I tried installing 9.0 since I was told the ati drivers don't work well with kernel 2.6.7, but the installer fails after downloading the installer. This is driving me insane. I can burnin my system to my hearts content but everything appears fine.

Anybody familiar with this problem or is it most likely my hard drives messign up?

Not to discourage any further but a colleague of mine at the office also built a new system with an SATA drive and he had to return it just days later because it failed to do it's job and became inaccessible. he now has a high speed IDE drive instead of SATA in his computer. i've heard that SATA is still very much a development product that has bugs like that...

and regarding the ATI card.. I can't really help there I don't have any ATI driver experience.

You may try using the 'vesa' driver. One thing to check is if you have a dual head system, is the sax2 output setting up on the other output? The vesa driver doesn't give you accelerated graphics, but it is a starting point. Next make sure the monitor setup is correct.

Another thing to try is to start 'sax2' with the -l option, to start in low-resolution. If you can see the video then, it may be easier to get things configured.