I had recently to setup CentOS 4.4 on a Acer desktop machine. Problem was that this machine (acert T180) contains a nvidia nforce chipset that neither centos default kernel or nvidia nforce driver disk (http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.21.html) support ... Solution was to pass the 'all-generic-ide' parameter to the kernel ... it treats sata discs as ide but it works ... and performances seem roughtly the same ... tip : don't forget to give this parameter in grub.conf also so that your machine will reboot after the setup part ....