Bug 429365

Created attachment 292215 [details]
Output from dmesg while running the F8 Live CD on the same machine.

UPDATE: I ran sha1sum on the F8-KDE-LiveCD.iso file and confirmed that it
matched the sha1sum on the Fedora mirror I downloaded it from. When I burned
that LiveCD to disc, I used K3B's "verify data" option, so I already knew it was
a good burn.
I also successfully installed F8 on my old computer* using the same LiveCD that
I used for the above abortive install. That computer boots just fine into and
runs Fedora, despite being a much lower-spec system. There is one error when F8
boots on that PC, though. Right before the "Red Hat nash" comment, I see a
message saying "Invalid PBLK length [5]". Like I wrote, it doesn't stop the boot
process.

* Machine specs for my old computer:
HP Pavilion 6735-kr, with a P-III 850MHz (Upgraded by me from the stock Celeron
CPU) on a TriGem Cognac motherboard with 384MB pc100 sdram and an Intel 82810
graphics/memory controller hub chipset.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/product?product=59857&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&lang=en&cc=us

UPDATE:  I have since then installed Fedora 9 via Live CD (both GNOME and KDE)
on a flash drive using the Fedora livecd-tools package from within F7.  F9
installs and runs successfully after reboot, but I've had repeated
package-installation problems with PackageKit (MD5 checksums errors on /every/
package install attempted within F9!), so I eventually nuked F9 and tried F8
again.  Same Live CD produces the same problem as before (LONG delays in
loading/uncompressing kernel, stall right after "nash" comment).  Note that the
local mirror I used has an F8 KDE ISO (
http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Live/i686/Fedora-8-Live-KDE-i686.iso
) which was last modified on 2007-11-02.

Then finally SUCCESS!  I KTorrented the F8 XFCE custom spin, dated 2008-02-12,
from http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/torrents//Fedora-8-Live-XFCE-i686.torrent
, and used the same livecd-tools package to put it on the same 1GB USB flash
drive as I used before.  It worked! The system rebooted successfully, and I'm
now using XFCE to download and install the F8 KDE and assorted other packages.

So the bug lies in one or more packages on the KDE live CD ISO and was corrected
at some point before the building of the XFCE spin ISO.  That ought to make it
easier to spot!

... or I suppose the bug could be in package(s) in the KDE CD but not included
in the XFCE CD, too.

  I think I figured out where this problem is coming from, and that it really does have to do with installing F8 as a dual- or multi-boot system that already has some flavor of BSD installed on it.

  I tried to re-install F8 (both x86 and x86_64) on another homebuilt box of mine (an AMD64 Sempron) that had had no problems with F8 beforehand. F8 was a stand-alone OS on that box before, but this time I wanted to also try dual-booting PC-BSD 1.5.1 and F8 together for comparison. I found that suddenly F8 no longer worked but showed the same problem as above: it would start to boot but hang up right after the “nash” message. However, as before, I could install F7 or the F8 XFCE re-spin dated 2008-02-12 and either one worked fine.

  I also noticed something else with this particular system. After I installed it next to PC-BSD, F7 assigned a different label to its own “/” directory in grub's boot arguments, which shows “root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet”. Filesystem checks during boot also ID the root partition as "/1" instead of "/".  Maybe the live CD installer program sees the BSD “/” partition and tries to avoid confusion between this and the Fedora “/” partition by assigning the “/1” custom label and/or making some other change, a change that F7 and the F8 XFCE re-spin handle well but not the initial release of F8 dated 2007-11-02?

  This other homebrew box has a 64-bit Sempron CPU, 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, an ECS GeForce motherboard (don't have the model name to refer to here), and NVidia graphics and media controller chips.

(In reply to comment #4)
> ... or I suppose the bug could be in package(s) in the KDE CD but not included
> in the XFCE CD, too.

UPDATE ON THE ABOVE:  With the XFCE respin on the above Soyo/Abit PC I mentioned on 2008-07-31, I was able to install, switch over to, and use KDE as my default desktop without problem.

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