Anaconda shows odd chars and hangs during install
 

I have a AMD 950 box that used to be runing red hat 8 (Onto which Anaconda installed fine, I haven't changed any of the hardware). When I install Fedora (most versions, I've tryed 3,4,5, and 6 they all do the same) I get past all of the selections to the part of anaconda that actualy installs the RPMs but rather than writing to the harddrive all it does is fill the screen with what apear to be european chars (part of the extended ASCII set, all of them) and will then ether hang or restart the machine. That it can write to the disk I am sure, becuase when it first happened while trying to upgrade RH 8, I decided to install over the top instead at which piont it created some new, black partitions and then hung with a screen that looked like a printout from printer with the wrong driver. I know that they're blank becuse I checked with Knoppix later.

Honestly, I'm confused, what could posibly cause this? Tonight I'm going to try taking pieces of hardware out one by one (and turning off the intergrated ones in the bios), but if that dosen't work, what could I try? I suppose I could reinstall RH 8, and then YUM and set it to update, but that won't get me a new kernal (which is why I was upgrading in the first place).

:scratch: What do you suggest?

I tryed taking out pieces of hardware last night, one by one. That wasn't the problem, but I found it (but no solution yet). By changing the selected packages list, I can change the piont at which it crashes, the "personal desktop" collection of packages crashes at 0% of dependancy checking, taking out the devemlopment packages brings it up to 20%, and then GNOME (but not KDE and X) brings it up to 56% and delselecting everything except KDE,X and "graphical internet" will get past dependancy checking, but will stop at some piont in the actual installation, not sure where, I whent to watch TV, when I got back it was writing the error "rpmdb: package downgrade, can't downgrade" over and over again.

So now, I know that there are some rouge packages making life dificult, the problem is working out which ones. Tonight, I plan on installing again with only those three selections in the package list, and watching it like a hawk (or is that penugin?) to see what exact package is causing the crash.