Tecra 8000 load problem

[JonR]

I've installed FC1 onto an old but serviceable Tosh Tecra 8000. Install went fine. When I try to boot the machine the load hangs but not always (apparently) at the same point. Often gnome will present its login screen and sometimes it gets as far as appearing to finish loading. Then when I try to run a program like OO or Mozilla the machine freezes.

Here comes the weird bit...

I can't soft reboot the machine so I have to take out the battery for a second or two or use h/w reset to reboot. During the second boot attempt, FC1 notes that the file system needs checking (and does it) and gives a whole string of messages like "modprobe: can't locate module block-major-nn" where 'nn' = 67, 68, 69, 70, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135.
But.., this second boot always completes ok and everything works fine after FC1 has sorted out the untidy closedown.

What's happening? I wondered if the Tosh was floating some part of memory so I tried removing the battery before 1st boot but that made no difference. It seems to be that if the machine shuts down tidily it can't then reboot successfully, freezing at some point during gnome load in most cases. Crash and reboot and everything comes up fine. The only error message I get during boot is a "delaying init" message for eth0 which since it is a PCMCIA card is reasonable as the PCMCIA drivers aren't loaded when FC1 is trying to bring up eth0. (eth0 works fine after second load has completed successfully.)

Can anyone suggest where I should start looking to figure out what's happening?

[JonR]

Progress so far:

Well, it isn't gnome. I get the same behaviour with kde as well. If I log out of gnome back to the Fedora log in screen and then h/w reset the system it will then reboot successfully(?!).

Interestingly, if I start a terminal and call 'halt' at the cli the system shutsdown correctly but when I power up next time I'm returned to the shutdown screen as it was when the system halted. I get the feeling I'm missing something really obvious here...

If anyone can point me in the right direction I'd be really grateful.

[JonR]

Running out of options here... I checked the bios to make sure it wasn't trying to resume instead of boot on power up. It was trying to resume so I set it to boot instead and... same problem, no change.

Can anyone help?