Fedora 7 crashed mid-upgrade - display problems
 

Hello all,

I recently attempted to upgrade to Fedora 7 (from FC6) on my laptop (a Dell Inspiron 6000 dual-boot with WinXP), using the DVD. I started the upgrade process and left it running overnight when packages started installing. When I came back to it in the morning, I discovered that it had frozen mid-upgrade (around package 500 or so) and I had no choice but to shut down. Unfortuantely, I didn't take note of exactly where it froze in the install process.

Now, when I attempt to boot Fedora, I get to the GRUB loader and find an option for Fedora (2.6.21-1.3194.fc7) and an option for Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6), plus an option for my WinXP partition, which is fine.

If I select either Fedora option, I get through the text part of the boot sequence (though selecting the FC6 kernel gets me the message 'PCI Failed to allocate I/O resource #7: 1000@10000 for 0000:00:1e.o') to a black screen with an X pointer. I can move the X around with the mouse, but at this stage it gets stuck and attempts to restart the graphical display over and over and doesn't get beyond the black X screen. When I hit the off button, I get a blue screen with the message 'The display screen has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds. It is likely that something bad is going on'.

Attempting to simply redo the upgrade with the DVD does not solve the problem.

/var/log/Xorg.0.log ends with the line "Synoptics Device Off Called"

Is there any way I can save the current install, i.e. fix this without reformatting/reinstalling from scratch?

Thanks very much in advance for any advice you can give.