I want to upgrade Fed 12 to Fed 13. So I ran the preupgrade. On reboot, I have a grub menu entry upgrade to Fed 13. I start it, it runs a bit, then leaves me with a blue screen, and nothing else. Ran the whole preupgrade again. Same story. Downloaded the live iso CD. Verify CD gives no problems, boot, runs a while, then leaves me with a small round black icon, which at first shows signs of life, but then freezes. No Live System!
Ha, I thought, I'll try Live CD Ubuntu. Same, runs until almost loaded, then nothing, just a coloured screen. No icons, nada.
Ha, I thought, I'll try Mepsis: same thing.

I'm beginning to think this is a hardware issue on my laptop, an Asus F5GL. Anyone else have this kind of trouble??

I can boot Fed 12 ok. I have Ubuntu 9.10 installed on another partition, but cannot get it to connect to a dsl internet connection, despite following the pppoeconf instructions exactly.

Installs can be very slow. Try a text install often it is done by typing

linux text

at the boot prompt. They are cruder, but less resource hungry

This was not an install, just booting from a Live CD. That is to say, first the upgrade went wrong. So I thought I'd install from a Live CD. Wouldn't load, so I tried others. No joy.
I've done lots of installs, and they shouldn't freeze anywhere, or just go blank. I could understand if the iso was corrupt, but I did verify it, and didn't get any probs. Three isos corrupt? Mepsis, Fed 13 and Ubuntu?
I just downloaded Centos Live CD. It works fine. Which would indicate that my hardware is ok. God knows what the problem is, but I suppose I'll just have to wait with the update.

How much RAM do you have in your machine? Most distros have some limit usually around 256MB is the minimum.

4GB, don't think hat's the prob

Could be the video hardware not liking the latest Xorg packages. I see that your laptop uses an Nvidia video chip, as does my desktop (different chips, however). I had to do a bit of messing around to get Ubuntu to boot properly (both 10.04 and 10.10 development), but Fedora 13 (and Rawhide) haven't been a problem. Can you boot F13 into text mode? The U10.04 standard desktop live CD doesn't offer a text-mode boot, but, I was able to switch to tty2 and do a text-mode login.

Yeah, something along those lines. Fed 13 wants to use nouveau I hear, but a vesa or vga boot should work, and play with the resolution later, but I don't get to start. I don't know why the Fed preupgrade didn't work. Took long enough downloading! All that fuss for nothing!