Mike A. Harris wrote: Hate to reply to myself, but I accidentally left off a few details...
As a hopefully useful additional datapoint... I've done very similar, but with the DVD image, having done: 1) Downloaded DVD ISO of FC6 via bittorrent 2) Verified the SHA1SUM of the image 3) Burned it to DVD+R and used the verification feature of the burn software to ensure the image burned correctly.
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4) Booted off DVD and attempted to install over top of an existing FC5 install.
After booting off DVD, I did a mediacheck which passed successfully.
The first attempt got as far as bringing up disk druid where I planned to custom partition. The installation hung with a kernel BUG() assertion which was dumped to one of the consoles. Anaconda et al. was no longer functional, however VC switching still worked. The second attempt got slightly further, allowing me to select my partitioning scheme in disk druid, however when I selected "Next" to leave disk druid and proceed, the installation hung again, this time with a fairly large python traceback.
There were also indications from the kernel that it was getting disk errors from the DVD drive. Booting into FC5, and creating a new ISO by ripping from the burned DVD, I was able to compare the original downloaded ISO to the one I recopied from my burned DVD, and they were identical. This confirms that my burn was unflawed.
Unfortunately, I didn't have my digital camera handy at the time, and wasn't able to capture the details for a proper bug report yet. When time permits, I'm going to attempt a 3rd install with camera in hand and try to capture useful details to dump in bugzilla. For the mean time, I thought it might be useful to share this here in case it helps others pinpoint down any problems. This system is a 2.8Ghz Intel Pentium 4 Northwood, with an i865 chipset, PATA drives. Currently running FC5 and another OS without trouble. I'll dump more info into bugzilla when I can reproduce it again.
I suspect the problem is kernel IDE driver related bugs, or perhaps related to DMA. Either way, all signs point to kernel bugs and not hardware bugs nor bad burn.
