PC can't boot recent Fedora releases.
 

Hello

For some reason my PC can't boot Fedora 16. I have successfully booted Debian 5, Fedora 12, and OpenSUSE 11.4, some of them is burned on the same type of disc as Fedora 16, so it's not a disc issue.

If i have the Fedora 16 disc in the drive at start up, the PC just boots and starts the currently installed OS, I have tried using smboot from grub, choosing "Boot from CD/DVD" that gets me a little further, to the Fedora disc menu, if i then choose to install, i get nothing but a black screen, and no activity on the harddisk or DVD drive.

smboot and memdisk guide:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=62872.0

Any suggestions is most welcome, as i would very much like to install Fedora 16.

Does your machine fulfill the minimum system requirements for fedora 16?

Yes, 2.66Ghz CPU, 1024MB RAM, 80GB SATA HDD, Radeon 9600 256MB.

Here's a suggestion but I assume you get into and work around your BIOS okay. But anyhow, assuming you have the boot order preset to boot from CD/DVD drive first, I suggest you go and see if there is an option to specifically specify for the BIOS to boot the DVD drive immediately. If so, choose to do that. In other words, once you choose that option, if immediately exits the BIOS and attempts to boot the disc. Have you tried this?

that ATI card is a legacy card
it might NOT be supported in the current Xorg
if not then you will NOT be able to install OpenSUSE 12 ,fedora 16 or 17 ,Ubuntu12 ,....
and NEW os

CentOS 6 will work

I have a 9600 XT running F16 (i686) quite happily. The radeon driver works fine.

I'd be looking to get rid of all the splash rubbish and watch the messages for clues. From the DVD boot menu hit <Tab> to get the boot command line - run the cursor back and delete "quiet rhgb" and then let it boot.

I can boot all other Linux distributions i have on disc just fine. OpenSUSE 11.4, Fedora 12 etc.

And the BIOS is set to boot CD/DVD first.

I will try that.

Solution
 

Yes!!

I managed to force my PC to boot from the Fedora 16 DVD, i had to use Smart boot manager on a floppy, http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm

I booted the floppy and selected to boot from the CD/DVD drive, in the Smart boot manager menu, this somehow forced my PC to boot Fedora 16,
the installation was successful and everything is fine now.

Thanks for all your help.