Dell Inspiron 5150 fails to boot F12 live CD

[jmw55]

Hello,

I have an old Dell Inspiron 5150 lap-top that I am trying to breath new life into. My hard-drive is large enough (120GB) to have multiple flavors of Linux reside on it, and so far I have successfully booted the live CDs for Ubuntu 9.10 and PCLinuxOS and installed into their own partitions.

I can not get the Fedora 12 live cd to boot. The media checks-out fine (both media check and booting on another lap-top), but there is an apparent problem with the graphics card. On boot, there is an error message that is too quick to read and then a progress bar at the bottom of the screen, which appears to complete then I just get a blank screen.

I've seen several threads regarding issues with NVIDIA. The video card in my lap-top is GeForce FX Go5200.

I guess the Big Questions are: Should I just give up? Can I boot into a text mode?

I tried booting the install DVD, and it will start the install in text mode, but the section where I do the partitioning doesn't seem to allow me to designate the partition I want to install into. I would really like to get Fedora running on this lap-top, and I am confused/dismayed that the other distros work but Fedora doesn't.

Thanks!

[jmw55]

I must admit to a little sadness... I wanted fedora to run natively on my lap-top, more so than any of the other distros (which I have yet to encounter the same video problem with). My clumsy work-around was to boot Windows XP, install VMWARE and run it in a virtual machine. Fedora seems "happy" there, so apparently the VM environment is buffering it from whatever the problem truly is. Sigh.