On Mon, 15 May 2006, Jan Iven wrote:

> Blinking Caps+Scroll lock usually indicate a kernel panic, which 
> also matches the "machine dead" description - on 2.4 kernels, it 
> actually would be sending a one-line error message via Morse code 
> (no joke).

Indeed - seen that, dusted-off my long-forgotten morse skills..

The real problem with 2.4 kernels seemed to be that such events left 
no permanent evidence, unless you had something connected to the 
console output to collect the evidence while it was happening.

> You could try to switch to a text console (Alt+Ctr+F1) close to the 
> end of the installation, and hope to see a more informative 
> backtrace from the kernel.

In quite a number of cases with kernel 2.6 (SL4) versions, on reboot 
I've found that some helpful diagnostics had been written to 
/var/log/messages [1].

If one can't get a newly-installed kernel to boot-up fully, one might 
nevertheless be able afterwards to boot something like Knoppix-live 
(or even SL-Live) from CD, then mount the partition where their kernel 
would have put the messages, and take a look.  I'm not certain that 
it's going to help, but maybe worth a try.

hope that's vaguely useful

[1] E.g mine is currently showing

 kernel BUG at fs/proc/generic.c:687!
 invalid operand: 0000 [#1]

etc., in response to my misguided attempt to "rmmod ndiswrapper", 
which produced flashing CapsLock.  But I digress.