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(in POST, my mobo even said that Linux was a virus, btw)
Probably because you have the so called virus boot protection turned on. It treats anything that attempts to modify the boot record a 'virus'.
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Linux 8.2 doesn't like my video card/monitor combination.
What video card do you have? Monitor shouldn't make a difference as long as it's setup properly in the X conf.
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Then it decided not to default gui mode.
ewww, gui as default.
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Gonna invest in a couple new hard drives and a raid controller just to be on the safe side from now on.
raid won't help you at all in situations like this. It will help if one of your hard drives dies (if you're using some form of redundancy), but if you screw up your partitions, delete your files, etc , raid won't help. You're more in need of a backup system (tape, cdr, etc).
Adrian