FC4 install problems...

[LarryB]

So here is my story, I installed FC4 with very little trouble, but it was locking up alot. Found the problem about the garbled swap entry in the fstab. Tried to fix that and royally borked the file. So I said fine I will just reinstall, this is where the fun begins. I have tried reinstalling about 100x in 3 days now. Every time I do it locks up somewhere in the process. Not just X either, I mean the entired system hangs. I have tried starting the installer with various switches from nofb,text and acpi=off. Nothing seems to keep it from locking up. I'm so frustrated with this thing and I don't know what to do now because I really want to get the thing up and running. I have deleted all partitions so that it could create fresh ones to get around a bug. I have ran memtest on it and it passes. I'm not sure what else to do and am looking for some feedback about possible things to try.

[steve941]

ok well .. assuming cd / dvd passed sha1sum
and media check is ok..
did you have problems installing 1st time around?
what kinda computer / hardware you have ..
i remember i had swap issues with FC4 depending on what my partition layout was.
i also found formatting didnt help ..
heres what ive done when i reinstall
fdisk -l
/dev/sda1 1 5 40131 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 * 6 7301 58605120 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 7302 9247 15631245 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sda4 9248 9729 3871665 b W95 FAT32
(If you don't need data or if its backed up)
reboot in rescue
dd count=5120 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1
dd count=5120 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda3
then fdisk /dev/sda
and not delete them, but change them just to type 83
and if theres nothing on the drive you need, you can do something like
dd count=256000 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

reboot, run installer

oh .. FC4 loves LVM, and eventually through many times (re)installing i finally found it out and havnt had problems since
i had to reinstall many times though with FC4 and ran into installer problems and the zeroing of the partitions, changing or zeroing the mbr got rid of those