I have installed Fedora 10 x86-64 on my laptop (HP dv9000 series) and when I boot the system will hang unless I press a key. In other words it turns on, loads grub, then begins to boot (same problem in graphical mode with the planet graphic, or not in graphical mode with the blue progress bar) but the bar does not progress at all until I press a key, when I press esc to see where it hangs- it keeps going as long as I am holding down any key until it gets past Starting udev: then it takes off and continues on its own and boots without a problem, but if I don't press anything it will never boot. I have installed the same version on a pc with no problems. I suspect it has something to do with the Plymouth boot engine in conjunction with nvidia graphics, but I have to narrow it down some more. Any one else experiencing this problem?
Here are my system specs:
HP DV9720US
AMD Turion64_x2
NVIDIA GeForce 7150M

After successful boot up with holding down a key until it boots, then start a command shell and look at boot log:

# dmesg

Also, try with some safe boot options to see if it will boot without problem, such as noacpi, etc.

update- I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for in dmesg, but nothing stands out.
I will try some safe boot options.

It is a kernel bug, use this kernel parameter in grub :

hpet=disable

That did it- Thanks!!
what exactly is hpet? I tried to look it up but so far all I got was stuff like "hpet=disable boot option: HPET is disabled and not used"- not very helpful.

That's a surprise - google found these two real easy;
wikipedia
hpet.txt

I feel like a fool! -don't know how I missed that,
thanks...

High Precision Event Timer