> Well I went through the entire install again, after which, my machine 
> gets part way through the install, then begins an endless screen dump of 
> too-fast-to-read text.

What hardware are you running?

Last week I installed 1.4.1 on a friends' PC with an Iwill XA-100-plus
motherboard and all IDE/ATAPI disks, and the IDE code was very unhappy.
I got symptoms very similar to some of the stuff you describe here.
I had to finish the installation manually but once booted, it worked well
enough to bring up X and run everything we tried while I was still there.

The strange thing is, I have a PC of my own with the previous model
motherboard (without the plus), which exhibits no such problems,
except the CD-ROM claims to support DMA transfers but doesn't.
(The 1.4.1 kernel recovers from this on the first error after booting
and is happy from that point on.)

I highly suspect that some newer IDE/ATAPI hardware isn't as well
behaved as it should be, and that unfortunately our released IDE
code doesn't recover well enough. Or perhaps the ALi IDE controller
has changed out from under us.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com