The installer is completely broken on Dell PE400SC/ Dimension 8300 systems with i875P based motherboard and mixed IDE/SATA drives. I finally got it to install but it took me two days. The basic problem seems to be what is drive 0 and 1. The bios and grub have them backwards from each other. For example in my system the installer wrote the grub MBR to one drive and /boot to another. This results in getting GRUB->hang on the screen. Once you figure out what is happening it is possible to fix everything by hand editing the device.map, fstab, etc. Dell PE400SC machine is $499. I'd recommend it as an excellent test platform for 875P and hyperthread CPU. Motherboard is OEM Intel. Also, SMP kernel hangs at boot on same machine if SATA is enabled. I believe this is because SATA IRQ is not enabled unless full APCI is turned on under SMP.
The installer provides an interface on the advanced boot loader screen to reorder drives. Unfortunately, on PC hardware there is no way to tell what the order of drives according to the BIOS is.
It's not a bug that installing Fedora CDs with default options on a common Dell system results in an unbootable system? How many tech support calls is this going to cause?