System is an HP Kayak XU, a PPro 200 multiprocessor capable machine with a single processor. 96MB RAM, CMD646 Controller, 3 IDE drives, all identical 4.5GB Seagate drives. During install, the partition check happens and the system sees existing partitions (if any, there were none originally). The install happens with no problems, and all data appears on the drive (verified by booting to the install disk, mknod /dev/hda, mknod /dev/hda7, mkdir /mnt/sys, mount /dev/hda7 /mnt/sys). However, during the boot after installing, the system freezes solid at "Partition check: hda" with ctrl-alt-del not functioning.
This appears to be a timing issue in the IDE driver coupled with a bug in the installer. The machine is detected as a multiprocessor box, yet has only a single processor. While booted to multiprocessor, there's a timing problem (probably) in the CMD646 driver that causes the hang.
Assigned to dledford
Boot with the 'noapic' option. The XU-200 bios seems to have invalid apic tables