going bonkers trying to install fc-5

[Jeff Vian]

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 15:28 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-06-18 at 18:09 -0600, Stanton Finley wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-06-18 at 18:54 -0500, Peter Horst wrote:
> > > Boy, I am having such a hard time figuring out what's wrong here.  I had 
> > > a couple of old beater computers, tried to install fc-5 from a cd set. 
> > > Hash-verified, should have been decent disks, etc. No dice. Neither 
> > > computer would "see" the boot disk.  Thought, "oh, well."  Needed a new 
> > > box anyway. Picked up an emachines t-3418 yesterday.  Burned fc-5 iso 
> > > disk 1 onto a new Taiyo Yuden 700mb disk - verified that the data is 
> > > present & accounted for (SHA-1 hash matches). And still! Despite any 
> > > changes I make to the BIOS settings, I cannot get this computer to boot 
> > > from the install disk - 
> 
> Two things you may wish to consider...
> 
> 1.) The CD drive itself may be borked and you may wish to test this with
> another drive. 
> 
> 2.) My brand new Athlon 64 machine had kernel panics from every several
> minutes to an hour or so. It would go BEEP! and reboot, usually at some
> critical juncture. After several days the machine just died. I took it
> back to the dealer and the power supply had crapped out. I'm thinking
> that many machines have marginal power supplies installed to save a
> buck. Once the new power supply was installed, the kernel panics stopped
> cold. Low voltage may cause many of the problems everyone experiences. I
> am not showing any burps in the barrel, the machine and all of it's
> peripherals work without a hitch.  I am happy. Ric
> 
I had a similar issue with a machine that was running happily with FC4.
Athalon 2400+ with 1GB ram.  When I tried to install FC5 on it, it kept
failing and flat refused to complete the install.  Usually failing while
formatting the drive.

The only change I made was to replace a power supply and it then happily
proceeded with the install.  I concur that a power supply that is
marginal can be cause for failure.