The SUSE installer worked OK, but when the comptuer did it's initial reboot during the install, we only got a black screen immediately after the normal Grub menu. Unplugged the data cables from the SATA drives and tried again. This time it worked, and SUSE was able to boot and finish installing.
Try the kernel parameter edd=off and report back.
Tried it... went from 100% failure to intermittent failure on boot. Disabled SATA, and that seems to clear up the rest of the boot problem... for Linux. Now of course with SATA disabled, we can't boot back to Windows without an extra step in the BIOS to re-enable SATA. Funny since all the other machines I installed SUSE on with SATA work fine. Granted this is an old motherboard with an early SATA controller... Still looking for a real solution... my brother (a new Linux user) still has it firmly drilled into his brain that Linux is too hard to use - fuelled by this hardware/software problem I've been trying to work him through. :-( C.