!?Fedora Core 6 hangs on Boot?!

[Fezar]

hi all,
Recently I installed fedora core six with the hope of triple booting alongside windows XP and openSuSE 10.2 on my FSC Amilo laptop whilst keeping the suse bootloader.
So added line in suse's menu.lst to use fc's grub.conf:

title Fedora Core 6
configfile (hd0,2)/grub/grub.conf)

and it appears to boot as when using fc's own bootloader.

But I have never got fedora to boot properly (i.e. get to loading kde) without interactive booting, and this is my problem. When I first installed it i chose not to install its own bootloader, but added its own info to my suse one as above, the initial first boot froze at loading service "xfs", and again on second time, third time froze before that at loading "crond" so booted using interactive setup and didn't load xfs and finally got to kde desktop. Today, when I boot up fedora I only get as far as "enabling /etc/fstab swaps" and the system hangs...

I have no swap partition for fedora as yet, as I was hoping to get it to use my suse one, but this caused no problem on the initial boot, and I do have 1 GB RAM

I can't Ctrl-Alt-Backspace kill whats going on without it freezing on a black screen

I'm a real newbie to fedora core (and linux) and I must say I was expecting more of fedora than this... What is going wrong?

Thanks for your help in advance!
Tom

[Zero-Override]

do you have particular USB-sticks/ipod/external storage attached to your computer at the time of booting?

what type of harddrive are you using? SATA or E-IDE (PATA)

[Fezar]

No, nothing attached at time of boot, and I have a SATA HDD

edit: just noticed system hangs just after "Enabling /etc/fstab swaps", as the cursor is on the line beneath this option, and it has "ok" just after it, message in top right says "loading sshd", in interactive mode nothing is displayed there ~ weird

[Fezar]

OK, checked out how to disable services in fedora, so booted into runlevel 1 (tricky cos of my bootloader setup, boot fedora, hit esc, then e to change cmd line to boot runlevel 1) then used chkconfig --list to find out what sshd was all about, found the relevant service and turned it off, googled for a list of all services then in a brain-numbing restart in default runlevel, then runlevel one reboot after turned each service off to find the culprit did:

chkconfig --level 2345 weird-looking-service off
for loads of services, boot progress indicator bar moved fractionally further each time, but this was just beacuse it had less to do on boot, so found out how to use ntsysv for different run levels and turned off everything except haldaemon, network, syslog and acpid this booted me into kdm and then logged me into kde.

So I've got a broken distro that only does the bare minimum, and a messed up /etc/fstab file, I can't even open up a Konsole, anyone got any advice how to progress? (cd / rm -rf /)?

Tom