[Malvern] Help!!

[Steve Cashmore]

Seasons greetings everyone!

Please, I need some help installing Fedora Core 6 on an almost bog 
standard desktop machine.  Please don't tell me to use a different 
distro, I have reasons for using FC6!

Basically the DVD installation stalls immediately after the 2nd screen 
which is selecting the keyboard type.  The screen clears the window in 
preparation for the next step and - nothing.

1  The motherboard is an Intel 845E with on-board Promise ATA raid 
controller.

2  The machine is multiple boot with an existing fully working FC4 
installation in a partition on a 2nd disk on the Promise controller.

3  I can see no obvious errors on tty3 & 4.  There *is* an 'audit' 
message on tty4 which looks like a SELINUX log.  But as far as I can 
tell SELINUX isn't activated at this point.

4  After locking up I still have a usable command line on tty2, and can 
see and mount the existing linux installation.  So there isn't a missing 
Promise driver issue.

5  One of the two anaconda / python installation processes is stuck at 
100% cpu.

6  I have tried text and graphic mode install options with exactly the 
same error at the same point.

7  I have tried options like noprobe, acpi=off, and reducing memory with 
mem=840M to no avail.  Locks up at the same point.

8  Even the rescue mode fails in the device.py script with a "size must 
be positive" message on enumerating the disk partitions.

9  The DVD (loaned from Geoff) validates OK.

So linux gurus please help me out, I can't yet think of a way around the 
probs.