I had a very similar problem, "interrupt handler - not syncing."
I tried booting the install CD with acpi=off, I tried removing all PCI cards except video card and drives except the cdrom and hard drive, tried swapping out the hard drive and resetting bios to defaults... etc.
Nothing worked until I swapped out my afree 52x cdrom drive for a spare from an old compaq. Now everything is working fine!
Don't know why that drive was a problem, I've used it on a different system to install Mandrake distros since 8.1. Maybe it's just something about the combination of that particular motherboard, cdrom, and 10.1 that caused problems.
Hope this might give you a lead that will help your situation.
