after grub, stripy screen

[Grant Allan]

> When anaconda tries to install in GUI mode, it does so by setting up
> the most innocuous options it can (VGA mode using the vesa driver,
> 640x480x8).  Unless you have some odd hardware, this should work--even
> on nVidia chipsets.  The actual operational GUI settings are done much,
> much later during the install (actually during the "post install"
> phase).
>
> If this is the same hardware that NTLDR disappeared from, where
> Windows forgot what NIC you had and you got weird display stuff doing
> a GUI install, then one must suspect that you're having hardware faults
> of some kind.  Flakiness in the PCI bus (dirty contacts, misaligned
> cards and such) can wreak havoc with your machine.  I highly recommend
> that you shut down the machine, open it up, reseat your memory sticks
> and PCI bus cards, button it back up and try again.
>
> You should also try running memtest86 from the boot command line off the
> FC4 installer disk and verify that you don't have a flakey RAM card:
>
> 	boot: memtest86
>
> Windows tolerates bad RAM far, far better then Linux does.  That's a
> "bad thing" IMHO (bad RAM, unless correctable via ECC hardware, should
> cause the machine to shut down because if you can't trust the RAM
> contents, you can't trust anything else), but it appears to be a fact.

thanks for this advice, i think you're right that there's something amiss
with my hardware.  i'll give that a go before anything else.  (hope it's
not a flaky motherboard.)

cheers,
grant