I don't know what's going on lately. I had Fedora 16 as well as
openSUSE 12.1 on separate hard disks for some time now. However following some updates, both distros crash while booting. SUSE will boot in safe mode, but can't load GNOME. Fedora won't even do that.
Just for the excercise, I tried to run live CD versions of Mint, Ubuntu, Knoppix, as well as Fedora and openSUSE. They all halted with the kernel panic message +0x6/0x10 Older versions of all these work like a charm, so there must be a common thread to these failures, some requrement that my setup does not meet. The question is what?
Gibabyte ga-p55a-ud6
Intel i7 860
8Gb Corsair memory
Audigy sound card
Nvidia GTS-450 1Gb
If anyone has a clue, I'd love to hear from you.

Do any of them show what the last thing they loaded/did was before the panic? Can
you pin-point a driver?

Thank you for your interest.
The script goes by too fast to read, so I can't tell what drivers are being loaded.
Just before the crash, I see the following
kernel_init +0xb2/0x13e
kernel_thread_helper +0x6/0x10
This is followed by a code, an end trace statement, then the kernel panic.

I am trying a fresh install at this point, but get the same results with a number of distros. Is there a way of pageing, or single stepping the installation script to see
if anything fails before the last screen?