Thanks to magic keys, I was able to semi-debug the issue. Apparently, F11 waits for a device to be mounted to continue at this point. The script that does this normally prints out this info -- but apparently the caller dumps it into /dev/null. In other words, the problem is hidden. This laptop can boot from the built-in HD, PCMCIA CD or network. No USB boot (too old). For whatever reason, PCMCIA CD isn't mounted at this stage of booting (only at either nash or HAL init). My solution: copy the contents of the CD to a USB drive and boot from CD with USB drive plugged in. USB drive will be recognized by the kernel and boot will continue off there. Here I hit another small snag: the USB stick is /dev/sdb (HD is /dev/sda*) because it's a single vfat partition. The init script (/sbin/real-init) waits for sr*/hd* or something like that because it's told to look for the CD label. Solution: set root=/dev/sdb in grub. Now I have finally booted live XFCE, yay! -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines