OK, when we last left our intrepid laptop, it couldn't install Fedora. Following advice in comments there, I tried a live version of Ubuntu, and it had no problem, other than telling me that it didn't have an open-source driver for the WLAN. Then I tried Fedora again. It hung up as it did before, but I went away and ignored it, and when I came back after a while, it had finally booted into the installer. Apparently I just hadn't been patient enough the last time.
Now, after selecting languages, it gives me a message saying "No driver found" It tells me that there is no driver for this installation for the device, and asks me if I want to install manually, or if I have a disk. When I try installing manually, it gives me a drop-down list of every driver for every device known to Linus. The only problem is that it doesn't tell me what device is causing the heartburn.
Any suggestions? I'm guessing that it might be the wireless, because of the message on Ubuntu, but who knows?
[Update a few minutes later]
The exact (cryptic) message is "Unable to find device type needed for this installation type."
Huh?
I bought my son a Toshiba laptop and he was never able to get the WLAN working with Ubuntu. Everything else worked like a charm. Lack of Linux drivers for wifi is a general problem I think. Very hit and miss. You can either buy a particular device known to have a Linux driver, or you take a stab at making the generic ndiswrapper work.
I should point out that Ubuntu didn't say it didn't have a driver. It said it didn't have an open-source driver. But when I looked for the WLAN in Networks, it didn't see it. Anyway, I have a Linksys USB adaptor for which I assume a Linux driver exists.
If it's doing nothing beyond booting to the installer, then I would say it can't find a device driver for your hard drive. It can't install anything if it can't talk to your drive, and I presume the first thing it tries to do is mount your hard drive so it can write stuff to it.
Go back into Ubuntu and try finding out what driver it's using for your hard drive. Maybe that will help.
Or...you know, just go back into Ubuntu and install it. Is there any reason you prefer Fedora? I used Red Hat from their first release through about Fedora 5 or so (I forget), but they got buggier and buggier and I switched to Ubuntu a while back. Much better. Open-source free as in beer software and people doing support for the sheer love of it is...a nice vision. But nothing in my experience beats someone with money and people with jobs to protect in terms of reliable long-term support. As long as Shuttleworth funds Ubuntu, I think it will stay ahead of the others.
I think you've got it, Carl. The place that the Fedora install was hanging was on AHCI, so that's probably what the problem is now. Unfortunately, the BIOS doesn't even allow reconfiguration of the drives (it's a SATA). You may be right that it's just time to give up on Fedora. The main reason that I've been sticking with is that I'm using it for my file server (and it's also my web server on a hosted server), and I didn't really want to have to work with two different distros.
It would be great to see your messages snapped with a digital camera (Alt-Ctrl-F2, I think). Without that, it's a matter of guessing what the issue is. Shooting in the blind, I would try pci=nomsi and see what happens.
I'd suggest using WPAsupplicant and WPAGUI as your wireless configuration manager in Ubuntu.
On your systray you will see a icon for your network connectivity. Just left click on that and you can add a wireless network. It will enable broad range support for WPA and various enterprise flavors of wireless security.