Hi, folks.  One of the professors here has a PC that I think is a former 
  Linspire box that she uses to control an experiment.  It's an AMD 
Sempron-based system.  The system runs SL 3.0.5 just fine, but she's 
looking for better device (USB, Firewire) support and newer versions of 
the "productivity tools" (OpenOffice, etc.).

We have attempted to install SL 4.3 (i386) on this system five times 
now.  Each time the installation appears to go completely smoothly until 
it reaches the stage called:

     Performing post installation configuration

At what appears to be exactly half way through that process (judging 
from the progress bar) the system hangs.  When the system hangs. the 
only visible activity is the regular, periodic blinking of the Caps Lock 
and Scroll Lock lights on the keyboard.

At that point the keyboard is inoperable, so it isn't possible to use 
CTRL-ALT F3, etc., to bounce over to the other windows to see what's 
really going on.  It isn't even possible to use CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot 
the system.

We have checked all of the CD's used in the installation, and the 
installer reports that they're all OK.

If we just plow ahead and reboot the system, we get a GRUB command-line 
prompt.  We've tried using the "root" and "setup", etc., commands at 
that point.  We've also tried the "linux rescue", chroot approach and 
doing some further GRUB fiddling.  I don't know whether or not the 
problem is fixable at that level, but I do know it isn't fixable with my 
level of GRUB skills.

We've tried replacing the disk drive, just in case there might have been 
a bad sector on the original drive.  That didn't help.  We've tried 
replacing the keyboard, just because the failure always occurs with 
keyboard lights blinking.  That didn't help.

Initially we tried selecting all of the packages that the end users 
really wanted, but our latter installations have been "minimal" ones.
We always get the same result.

Any suggestions?  Thanks.

					- Mike
-- 
Michael Hannon            mailto:[log in to unmask]
Dept. of Physics          530.752.4966
University of California  530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677