FC3 hang on boot, X fail, mount problem, media check inconsistency

[Dave Jenkins]

Hi,

I'm new to this list, have been using RH 8.0 for the
last year or two and SuSE before that. Trying to
install FC3 on a new machine after my old one gave up
the ghost.

My hardware:
MSI KM4M-L mobo, onboard VGA (S3 UniChrome), LAN &
sound
Athlon XP 2600+ Barton
512MB Kingston DDR400 ValueRam running at 333
80GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
6GB Fujitsu HDD (not used for Fedora)
Creative 48x CD-ROM

RH 8.0 installs and runs fine on this hardware, I'm
using it as I write.

Problem (1):
MD5 sum and installer's media check on my FC3 CD ISO
image files all passed. However media check on CDs
burnt from disc 2 & 3 ISOs failed: tried 5 burns in
all. I then tried mounting the ISO files as loop and
comparing with the CD contents using "diff -r". This
produced no diffs between any of the ISO images and
their corresponding CDs, even the 5 CDs that had
failed the media check.
I installed from the ISO files on my hard drive.

Problem (2):
FC3 install appeared to work but system consistently
hung on boot. It would get as far as:
"Initializing hardware... storage network audio done
[OK]"
Then the screen would blank for a second, come back,
show:
"Configuring kernel parameters"
and then just sit there. Not locked up, but going
nowhere.
This happened consistently after reinstalling in
various configurations, except that a minimal install
booted OK.

Solutions tried to (1):
Following advice on other threads here, I tried:
a) disabling ACPI in BIOS,
b) appending "noapic" to boot command
c) appending "apci=on" to boot command
d) appending "apci=off" to boot command
I also tried (c) & (d) with "acpi" and "apic" as I
wasn't sure which was correct.
None of these made any difference.
I then randomly tried:
e) removing "rhgb" from boot command.
This fixed the hang, and led me to...

Problem (3):
X failed to start, with error "No valid modes found".
Preceding this in the log was a long string of
messages where it had tried numerous modes and
rejected them all due to hsync allegedly out of range.
The installer had correctly identified the VGA &
monitor (Iiyama Pro 410). I haven't got any further
with this because of...

Problem (4):
I was getting bored with continually re-trying Fedora
installs followed by re-installing RH 8.0 so that I
had a working machine to browse for help and generally
do stuff. I only have one machine. So I installed RH
8.0 on my 6G drive where the FC3 ISO files were,
temporarily moving the ISOs to the 80G drive. However
when I try to mount the Fedora partition from RH8.0 to
copy the files back, I get an error: mount says "wrong
fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda2, or
too many mounted file systems" and syslog says:
"EXT3-fs error (device ide0(3,2)):
ext3_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 0 not
in group (block 1868783461)!"/
"EXT3-fs: group descriptors corrupted !"
Same happens if I try to mount as ext2.
I had allowed the FC3 install to choose the
partitioning. Was that a mistake? fdisk says:
   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id 
System
/dev/hda1   *         1        13    104391   83 
Linux
/dev/hda2            14      9729  78043770   8e 
Linux LVM
Can RH 8.0 read a "Linux LVM" filesystem? If so, how?

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm the sort of Linux
user who's in it for the stability rather than the
hacking, so if your honest advice is "Fedora's not for
you, try another distro", that would count as help!

Cheers,

Dave


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