Hi,
I'm not possitive what's going on so I'm going to do a test install and 
see what it's doing.  But while I do that, just some questions.
Is there anything out of the ordinary on this machine?  firewire, 
strange wireless things, stuff like that?
What are you installing?  Just a personal desktop, developers station, 
personal with KDE, everything?

Troy

Michael Hannon wrote:
> 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


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Troy Dawson  [log in to unmask]  (630)840-6468
Fermilab  ComputingDivision/CSS  CSI Group
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