F8 install failure again & again

[Felix Miata]

I've just made my 5th unsuccessful full attempt to install F8 on a 2 PATA
disk i815 Dell PIII 1133 MHz 512M RAM system that has the following fully
functional operating systems:
Debian Etch
DOS
Fedora 6
Fedora 7
Knoppix 4.0.2
Kubuntu 7.10
OpenSUSE 10.0
OpenSUSE 10.2
OpenSUSE Factory
OS/2
SUSE 9.3
WinXP
Xandros 3

On each successive attempt I've added more of the "Overriding Automatic
Hardware Detection" options from docs.fedoraproject.org, the last time using
about 80% of them.

On the first aborted attempts, I was trying to include the various IP
assignments as on "Manually Configuring the Network Settings", but each time
it wanted manual entry of the IP, using the cmdline parameters only for mask,
gateway & dns, then aborted immediately upon completing network configuration.

I gave that up and tried with nothing on cmdline. That got me all the way
through package selection, but then anaconda aborted as soon as told it to
proceed to install the selected packages.

>From then I used as a minimum acpi=off and noapic, and got anaconda to claim
its first successfully completed installation. It couldn't be booted though.
First I had to boot it from F7's grub, since the only locations it had
permitted me to choose from were nowhere and on the mbr. Since MBR is not an
acceptable location for any additional Linux installation, I was forced to
choose nowhere. That boot attempt produced the following:

...
Waiting for driver initialization
Loading ata_generic.ko module
noresume passed, not resuming...
creating root device

That's where it simply stopped.

I got it to boot using the F7 kernel, whereupon I found no eth0 and corrupted
rpm DB. modprobe e100 got me network. After finding 97% of the install log's
entries were rpm errors, rpm --rebuilddb got yum usable for installing the
crucial mc rpm missing from available packages to select from. Next I did yum
update. From then on, I couldn't complete a boot with either of the F8
kernels nor the F7 kernel.

So I went on to try from scratch again, twice, getting similar results both
times. More cmdline options made it even worse. Two more times yet again
anaconda claimed complete, even though it didn't bother installing any
kernel! Right now on tty2 after 5th full try I'm looking at the output of ls
-l /mnt/sysimage/boot, and see only:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root 0 1024 Sep 20 20:21 grub

Right now, cat /proc/cmdline:

noapic acpi=off skipddc nodmraid nofirewire noparport nopcmcia nousb vga=788

Target is Maxtor 20G PATA secondary master 4.8G partition 11 out of 13 total
shared by DOS, OS/2, SuSE 9.3, OpenSUSE 10 & Knoppix. Seagate PATA primary
master has 120G with >16  partitions. Primary slave is ZIP100.

On attempt 4, I tried to install mc and a kernel:

mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc11 /mnt
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
cd mnt
chroot /mnt

That resulted in too many errors to remember, but it seems package management
is unavailable in chroot.

I'm starting install each time with grub on hda5, specifying
mirrors.kernel.org /fedora/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os as source.

Logs from an early attempt:
http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/tmp/anaconda-ks-f8-gx150.cfg
http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/tmp/anaconda-f8-gx150.log
http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/tmp/anaconda-f8-gx150.syslog
http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/tmp/anaconda-f8-gx150.xlog

ATM, I'm running a text install using noapic acpi=off, but am not hopeful of
materially different results.

Without making hardware changes, I'm at a loss what else to try. Ideas?
-- 
"   Our Constitution was made only for a moral
and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to
the government of any other."         John Adams

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/