It appears we have found the origin of the problem with the new 2.6.18-1.2200.fc5 kernel hanging during the initial boot on an Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. The identical machine which booted this kernel fine did not have ide=nodma passed to the kernel. Removing this from the grub.conf of the problem machine allowed it to boot the newer kernel fine. Oddly the previous 2.6.17-1.2187_FC5 kernel doesn't have a problem with the ide=nodma option. Odd. Jack