At first I had an ATI Radeon 9200SE (the Windows ME of video cards) in this box, but I was afraid it was the problem, so I switched it out for an ATI Rage 128 32Mb card and reinstalled. Same problem, basically. The problem is, upon firstboot after installation, the system hangs during boot. I get as far as the graphical boot, but then at various times the system hangs hard (can't ctrl-alt-del, can't ctrl-alt-F1, etc.). If I reset the machine and then try to boot again, the result is predictable: the system hangs again on "enabling swap space." The only way I can then get past that point is to boot into single-user mode, checking the root partition on the way, and then reboot after single-user mode comes up. However, all that does for me is get me back into the original state where I crash randomly during the graphical portion of the boot.
There are a bunch of reports on the web from people who crash on "enabling swap space." Many of them have USB issues (I have no USB devices installed) and others have X issues. I tried modifying anaconda's choice of video driver (using "vesa" instead of the Radeon or r128 drivers), but that didn't help either.
I had been running FC1 on this computer very successfully until a few days ago. Because I have had trouble with the SMP kernel in FC1, I tried booting the non-SMP 2.6 kernel in FC2, but it didn't help. I also tried using no acpi and no apm, but that didn't help either.
I have successfully installed Mandrake 10 on this machine (2.6 kernel) as well as Xandros Desktop OS 2.0 (2.4 kernel). In both cases I was able to boot with the later video card and the r128 driver, so I'm pretty sure this is not an X issue. Any other ideas?
Thanks, Matt
