Installation of Fedora 5 failure. Help needed

[Shujia Gong]

Thank you for this valuable advice, David.

I am installing on a DELL PowerEdge SC1425. I deleted "rhgb" and "quiet" 
from the kernel line and  the system will run normally until the login 
page show up and then the system halt again. I don't feel it is the 
graphic adapter problem because during installation and post-processing 
of installation, the keyboard, mouse and monitor were working well.

When I tried to install the minumum package of Fedora 5, I once thought 
that it was a complete success because the system was up for a moment 
and I could use Firefox to browse Internet. However, it died suddenly 
and when I reboot it, the system halted at the point of login again and 
the moniter became dark.

I don't know whether you or anybody else can provide me further advice. 
Thanks!

Frank

David Timms wrote:

> sgong at gmu.edu wrote:
> ...
>
>> I downloaded CD images several times and tried to burn into CD
>> several times. Everytime when I do the disk test before installation,
>> disk 3 and disk 5 will fail the test.
>
> There is a known problem where the media check will fail on perfectly 
> good cd/dvd images. If you  check the sha1sum of each iso with that 
> provided on the fedora download site (sha1sum), you can check that you 
> have a clean download image.
>
>> I then used DVD image to do the test, and it passed. However, when I
>> installed the OS to my computer,
>
> What options did you choose in package selection ?
> Can you give an idea of the motherboard/cpu/ graphics adapter you are 
> using ?
>
>> after the installation was finished
>> and the system reboot, it would halt after I entered the username and
>> password to login and before the final desktop showed up.
>
> When it appears halted can you switch to one of the text mode 
> terminals using ctrl-alt-f1 to f4 ?
> If so, log in and run   top  to see if some process has gone awol (q 
> to exit) ?
>
> If can't get to a terminal, touch a key while booting, so that you can 
> modify the grub kernel boot line.
> Edit the kernel line and remove the rhgb and quiet words. You will now 
> see all that is going on behind the scenes (text), and the last few 
> lines pasted here will hopefully lead to a solution.
>
>> If I reboot
>> it, the system will stop before the login page appear.
>
> Again grub|kernel remove rhgb and quiet. Also, try to start in 
> runlevel 3 (no GUI); this can help to determine if it is something to 
> do with X.
>
>> I tried both installation DVD and CD for 6+ times, and the phenomenon
>> is the same. I wonder if anyone has seen this problem before and how
>> to solve it. Or anyone has ever installed it successfully, what was
>> his hardware configuration and software package.
>
> Personally installed FC5 on about 6 machines (pentiumII,celeron,amd 
> athlon 2600, and more modern intels and AMD's) with between (128 and 
> 1G ram), notebook PC's (eg HP omnibook 4150, hp xe2, hp compaq 
> nx9000), little to all items selected.
>
> If you reply with the info above, you'll probably find that someone 
> will know what is going on :)
>
> DaveT.
>