Linux install

Im kinda lost here on your situation. In my exp with Linux you have a couple choices for your partition structure during setup. Disk Druid and Fdisk, there is also the fips utility. They all allow viewing of your partition structure. I hope Im not misunderstanding you on this one but all are a little tricky to use but it sounds like you already know these programs.

send more info for a clearer view of the circumstances.

My guess would be that your new motherboard has a new HD controller not compatible with your current kernel. What you can try is to put the new kernel 2.4.3 instead and see, it might be supported. You can find information about upgrading your kernelat www.kernel.org.

If it's really a problem of support of your new controller, you can try to go in the Bios of your motherboard and see if you can turn set your controller to be slower, like ATA-66 I think. It'll let you boot your machine and install everything. If you are willing to keep it slower like that, go ahead but I would also suggest that you try a newer kernel to see if your controller is supported so you get maximum speed.

I am not sure this will help you but here's an experience I had.

I just installed RH7 and it did not work right. It would not allow logins and would not allow an editor to write to the hard drive even when booted in single user mode. I found out that they set linear mode by default during the install. I did the install again being sure linear mode was not set. This time it worked.

If you don't have SCSI drives on your system, this may also be causing problems for you. You may also need to re-install being sure linear mode is not set.