those Fry's Elect. computers

After some of the discussion and success stories, I decided to go down
and grab one. Picked out and AMD type, bought it, and AMD 450 K-6 and
128MB and a new HDD. I can't get anything to come up! Used their Linux
disc and it halts with the message " Calibrating delay loop..."

Then tried Mandrake, Storm, a Redhat 6.1 from an Admin beginner's book
and an older 5.1 version that boots from floppy. Got nowhere on any of
them. The old 5.1 version only saw the 1st 64MB of RAM available.

Any ideas? I'm beginning to think I need to pre-format the HDD, it's
virgin.