Thanks for the information Bas, but I am not sure it is the same problem I am experiencing. I removed the aha-2940 uw scsi controller card and disconnected the scsi hdd and the installation of sarge (debian-installer tc1 with a 2.4 kernel) worked fine. I added the scsi controller and reconnected the scsi hdd and now during boot I experienced the same monitor turn off and the system being unresponsive. If it is helpful I can tell you roughly where in the boot sequence this happens, but currently I am unable to use my scsi disk.I am trying to install debian sarge (with debian-installer) on a 1.4Ghz Athlon with a K7S5A motherboard, AHA-2940W SCSI controller, 4GB SCSI disk, 40GB IDE disk, network card and vga card. I tried to use the boot cd for test candidate 1 and when it gets to detect hardware the monitor turns off and the machine is unresponsive.I have the same motherboard. Recent kernels (2.6/alsa) lock up the computerwhen the snd-intel8x0 module is loaded. See http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2737