Even so, The installation program crashed, flat out, without warnings... the location of /boot and sizes of partitions should not cause such a thing... <snip> No it should not (does not) cause such a problem. Do some obvious things first, check all the hardware connections in the machine, particularly the IDE cables. If you can swap the CDROm drive with another (i assume you are installing from CD), I have had problems sometimes with CD's on certain drives. Remember Linux is much more vigorous than Windows in it's hardware requirements. Windows answers shaky hardware by giving you blue screens, Linux tends to hit it earlier on ! Try doing the absolute minimum install you can under Suse.

The othe problem may be drive geometry, check the BIOS settings vis a vis large drives. Disable PNP in the Bios. Good luck Cliff