Fedora 10 boot, display and keyboard problem

[JohnUK23]

I've just installed Fedora 10 on an 8Gb Kingston USB pen drive and whilst everything seemed to go okay, and it seems to boot, it is unusable as it doesn't complete. The install options I chose were to download the Fedora 10 iso and a 2Gb partition (or whatever word it used -- I remember the installation failed when I forgot to change it from 0Mb on my second of three attempts to install the OS).

The PC I'm trying to boot up on is a HP Pavillion a1000 2.x GHz with 256Mb RAM. I put the USB drive in one of the front ports, turn on and press escape to go into the boot menu to select the boot from USB option, and it then starts booting up.

One of the messages I notices says something like "Cannot load System Description Table" but it continues booting. I end up with a menu in the middle of the screen with Cancel and confirm buttons but the text on it is corrupted so I can't read it. There's a mouse pointer visible but clicking on the buttons doesn't do anything. None the key combinations I've tried do anything: Ctrl+F1-6, the F keys, Esc etc achieve anything either. But by this time I also find that the CAPS Lock light doesn't come on anymore so I presume it's lost contact with the keyboard (normal keyboard connector not USB; the mouse is a USB optical mouse).

I discovered that when the Fedora screen appears with the 9-1 countdown, I can press the down arrow key to make a menu appear but none of the options (e.g. Verify then boot) help.

[Johnny Utah]

Try this:

At the Fedora countdown, press the down arrow and select your kernel. Press e to edit it and append 'noacpi'.

It should look something like this:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.29.4-167.fc11.i586 ro root=/dev/mapper/vg_jfedora-lv_root noacpi

Press b to boot the kernel.

[JohnUK23]

Thanks for the reply

I pressed the down arrow key at the countdown screen, up popped the menu (options: Boot, Verify and Boot, Memory Test, and Boot Local Drive, if memory serves).

I noticed that it told me to press the tab key to edit the options so I did that and on the Boot and Verify and Boot options got something like what you quoted above (though it didn't start with the word 'kernel' but the 'vml...' bit). And I wasn't sure from my print out whether the last character was an 'i' or 'l' so tried both on one of the menu options. Just pressing enter after appending the 'noacpi'(or l)' caused the PC to start rebooting. Unfortunately I ended up at the same place: "Automatic Login" menu which didn't respond to clicking and an undetected keyboard.

[Johnny Utah]

Yeah, disabling ACPI was a long shot, but my best guess.

[JohnUK23]

Thanks anyway