Hi, I have a same case as of kevalvora, My PC specs are ditto same... I think the solution to this crash is to enable your CD/DVD drive as Master and physically uninstall any Modem/LAN cards from your system. Then check it out... I will let you know by doing this....

Another thing,, kevalvora are you using IDE Hard drive or SATA ??

I am using 20GB IDE type, and 160GB SATA HDD, fedora is installed in SATA HDD

@Shafty023
I checked out my settings, the IDE is installed on secondry SLOT of motherboard
CD-ROM is connected to master of IDE & 20GB HDD on Slave and ther r no jumpers on my HDD..i dunno y..

I have pretty much the same config and am facing the exact same problem.
The problem doesn't lie with FirstBoot or Smolt.

Disabling Multiprocessor support in BIOS immediately helped (Enable SW Single Processor Mode). The machine was detected as a single processor machine and everything worked beautifully.

Makes me think that the problem could be with the kernel or an associated module.

HTH

rajibghosh thank you so much.....its been approximately 1 month i was with this problem.....now its solved.......thank you so much
So, basically we are turning our Multi Core Processors to Single Cores rite?

Here's a quick update:

As mentioned earlier, switching the computer to work in Single-Processor mode got things running with the default i686 kernel on Fedora Core 9 DVD. So figured, a kernel update/build could help. Update is simpler.

A BIOS update could help, but I was already running what Intel had on offer on their website (BIOS Update 1087 [GC11020M.86A] 1087 1/30/2007).

After fighting with 'Update System' and 'NetworkManager', managed to download Kernel Update.

Upgraded my machine (Intel Pentium-D on Intel D102GGC2 motherboard, 512x2 DDR2, 160GB PATA HDD) from 2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 to 2.6.25.10-86.fc9.i686.

Enabled multi-processor support in BIOS and restarted the machine. Voila! Machine booted up beautifully.

Could login. System monitor showed dual-cpu.Then the keyboard got stuck. The mouse got stuck soon afterwards. Both are PS/2 units connected via IoGear KVM switch.

Connected the peripherals directly to the computer and restarted. No luck. 5 minutes into system, the peripherals would get stuck again.

I noticed this message at computer start everytime:
ENABLING IO-APIC IRQs
..TIMER: vector=0x31 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1
..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
...trying to set up timer (IRQ0) through the 8259A ... failed.
...trying to set up timer as Virtual Wire IRQ... works

So figured that their could be a problem between the kernel and PS/2 controller.

Connected a USB mouse to the computer and re-started. Worked beautifully. Although the PS/2 keyboard got stuck, the USB mouse kept working. Swapped the PS/2 keyboard with a USB one, and here I am ... typing out a report on my PC running FC9.

HTH
P.S: I guess I will have to build the kernel after all to enable PS/2 functionality.

Removed FC9 and install Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.0.4

Installed in 20 minutes flat. The usual "8254 timer bug" message at boot up. But the OS started.
Loaded the default gnome desktop. An icon on the taskbar informed that Non-OpenSource drivers were available for my PC.
One-click install for the ATI drivers. Enabled full-desktop effects (Compiz). No xorg.conf edits.

The Network Manager didn't act up either. Detected that the machine was connected, received an IP and business as usual. Didn't have to disable the service as I had to do on FC9.

Looks like the 1 month I waited for release of FC9 (instead of dnloading FC8) was a total waste.

That doesn't mean there is anything wrong with Fedora.

I have installed F9 on many machines since it's release without any trouble, with exception of a couple of minor bugs that were fixed in updates (which you'd expect with a testing distro).

Likewise I have done successful installs of Ubuntu, but also had machines that were nothing but trouble with it, so I installed Fedora and they were fine.

It's just certain problems on certain distros seem to arise with certain hardware.