Hello. A happy, error-free report about my experiences last night. Only one small inconvenience in the install.
I have an AMD Athlon64 3700+ in a MSI Neo2-F motherboard (Via K8T800 Pro chipset), with a WD Raptor SATA drive and an older WD 80gig IDE drive. The system has 1 gig of RAM and a CDROM (not DVD). The on-board network is a Realtek 8169/8110 chip. My video is a 6800GT (AGP).
The BIOS instructs the machine to boot off the SATA drive first, which is partitioned completely to a recent install of Win XP SP2.
Using CentOS 5 CDs, I booted and began the installation on my IDE drive. I told Grub to install itself on the SATA drive's MBR (this required going to the advanced options menu), and I partitioned my IDE drive entirely to / , except for 1 gig to swap and 10 gig to vfat (for a simple, common writeable partition between XP and Linux).
I installed CentOS 5 without glitches, rebooted, and Grub came up as it should. I proceeded to boot to CentOS.
My one problem: no network. The Realtek chip was not detected. I rebooted to XP, did some googling, and figured out that I needed to download the appropriate Realtek drivers, build and install them. I put the drivers on my vfat partition (grabbing the NVidia video drivers too), rebooted to CentOS, built/installed the drivers, and then had to reboot one more time before network would work.
All finished! The slowest part of the process was customizing which packages to install and sitting around waiting to swap discs. My old Lite-On CD burner has been moved forward through a few system builds now... it keeps chugging.
Brian Barnes Washington University in St. Louis