current kernel is 2.6.15-1.1948_FC5smp from rawhide, but this has been seen with earlier FC5 kernels as well. During the early boot phase it fails to find the SATA disk and the kernel panics and aborts. Multiple power cycle and boot might produce a successful boot, but its random. Booting with pci=noacpi seems to be reliable. System is an HP xw4200 workstation, with bios 786c3 v00.10, its located in my cube (system name is chickadee). I tried upgrading the bios but that failed. FWIW the final boot message is something along the lines of "ATA1 can be slow, please be patient". I suspect what is happening, this is only a guess, is that the interrupt routing is hosed and the probes for the disk are failing.
These bugs are being closed since a large number of updates have been released after the FC5 test1 and test2 releases. Kindly update your system by running yum update as root user or try out the third and final test version of FC5 being released in a short while and verify if the bugs are still present on the system .Reopen or file new bug reports as appropriate after confirming the presence of this issue. Thanks
A new kernel update has been released (Version: 2.6.18-1.2200.fc5) based upon a new upstream kernel release. Please retest against this new kernel, as a large number of patches go into each upstream release, possibly including changes that may address this problem. This bug has been placed in NEEDINFO state. Due to the large volume of inactive bugs in bugzilla, if this bug is still in this state in two weeks time, it will be closed. Should this bug still be relevant after this period, the reporter can reopen the bug at any time. Any other users on the Cc: list of this bug can request that the bug be reopened by adding a comment to the bug. In the last few updates, some users upgrading from FC4->FC5 have reported that installing a kernel update has left their systems unbootable. If you have been affected by this problem please check you only have one version of device-mapper & lvm2 installed. See bug 207474 for further details. If this bug is a problem preventing you from installing the release this version is filed against, please see bug 169613. If this bug has been fixed, but you are now experiencing a different problem, please file a separate bug for the new problem. Thank you.
Hi Dave: The box in question no longer has FC5 installed, but if it helps the exact same box boots fine with FC6 without having to override acpi. So I can't confirm its fixed in FC6 but I can confirm its fixed in FC6.
should be fixed in 2.6.18-1.2239.fc5 now in updates.