So, it turns out this is a Tyan Thunderbolt 440GX chipset, dual 800Mhz PII, 256MB, 18GB SCSI drive on an Adaptec 7896.
Live cd of M7 and 6.5 both seem to work fine although I have to use one of the"for old machines" configurations on 6.5.
However if I install and try to boot from the HD I get:
Kernael panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
A search shows that it would appear that something isn't pointing to where the kernal lives but I'm not savvy enough to know what it is or how to fix it. Help would be appreciated.

Interestingly Ubuntu 6.x works fine on this machine but Slackware and its derivitives (like Absolute) won't work. I haven't tried straight Mepis yet because its only got a cdrom drive.

Update- Okay a websearch points to lilo.conf as a place that things could be confused. Its supposed to live in /etc. I check there and don't find it. Then I realize I'm an idiot and I go to /mnt/sda1/etc and still don't find it. Maybe part of my problem?

Update again - Double DOH! Found the Grub file... for as much as I know it looks right, it refers to sda1... Don't know alot about what I'm looking at though.

Curt

Welcome curtludwig to antiX and lets try to get you up and running.

Reboot and when you get to the grub menu (the screen where you get to choose the antiX), try all the options.

If you still get a kernel panic error, then as before, but before you hit the Enter button, change the root=sda1 part to root=hda1 by navigating using the arrows keys.

DOH! I can't believe I'm such a chowderhead I'd have missed that...

So I've done all that and still get exactly the same thing.
Then I remembered that I have 6.5 installed right now. I'll run the M7 installer and try again.
-Update: Same thing, same error... I'm thinking now its got to be something about my SCSI controller. Wish I had an extra IDE drive hanging around. Might have to spend some time scrounging.

Using the livecd, can you navigate to /mnt/hda (or where your installed antiX-M7 is)/etc/fstab and post it here. Also the same for the boot/grub/menu.lst