F12 RC4 hangs on waiting on hardware to initialize

[maflynn]

As the title states, my MacBook Pro (with 4gig) hangs on booting up the 64bit flavor of F12 RC4. I made sure that I disconnected all external devices and it still occurs.

Bump: I just tried the F11 64bit install DVD and that appears to be working flawlessly. I was able to get into the installer and start the install process, so its not a 64bit issue but to be safe, I am downloading the 32bit dvd ISO and once that's finished within an hour or two (slow dsl) I'll try that as well.

Bump: Looks like I got beyond the problem. By adding both xdriver=vesa and nomodeset I got beyond the problem. I needed both as tried adding one then the other. Only when both were used was I able to boot up the install DVD

[CSchwangler]

If you need nomodeset, the problem is likely related to kernel mode setting and your graphics card, which seems to be the default with F12's kernel. This would explain why it works with F11, since it wasn't enabled in F11.

[AdamW]

what model of macbook pro is this exactly? you can tell from smolt output or other ways, iirc, and they're referred to numerically - something like (5,1).

[maflynn]

It's a 5,1 macbook pro (late 08 unibody model).
2.53 GHz, 4gig of ram, dual GPU

[AdamW]

Hum, I can't find a bug for that, and several reports of _other_ issues from 5,1 owners which would suggest booting works OK for them. Huh.

Can you try switching back to the native driver on the installed system - rename /etc/X11/xorg.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak or something, and reboot? See if it fails. If so, it'd be good if you can get copies of /var/log/Xorg.0.log . The procedure is to boot so it fails, then boot to runlevel 3, take a copy of the log, put /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak back as /etc/X11/xorg.conf , then boot back to the working desktop.