Gabriel Ramirez wrote:
On 10/29/2009 02:23 PM, Mike Cloaked wrote:
  
 
In my wife's case she reported that when hitting the enter key to login
under kdm the screen went black, and this was followed by a cursor at top
right and repeated lines containing text, with "nouveau_fifo_free:freeing
fifo 1"

So this appears to have been a graphics issue concerning the nouveau driver
- however this evening I was able to boot this machine and am running on the
previous kernel for safety. (2.6.30.8-64.fc11.i686.PAE)
    

in the above case, maybe her mistyped her password in one ocassion  and
when typed it correctly , the machine got the following bug
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=506171  " If password
entered incorrectly in KDM, next successful login causes X server
shutdown and hang  "

maybe you can try to mistype your password and enter correctly with
kernel 2.6.30.8-64 to discard kernel-2.6.30.9-90.fc11.i686.PAE as the cause

  
The other machine is extinct - I cannot boot at all even to a liveCD so I
can't investigate it.  However at the time that failed there were weird
graphics artifacts with multicoloured lines - and it is conceivable that it
could have also been a graphics issue - on boot it puts port00: after the
first message on the screen, and then some stuff on the screen (after the
post check complets) but no boot - I tried partedmagic DVD but it won't boot
at all.  I suppose that the disc could have gone bad and over the weekend
will replace the drive and see if that allows a boot and re-install - but I
am out of ideas on that... however the nouveau failure on my wife's machine
worries me....
    

if you disconnect the hard drive, maybe you can boot from a livecd, to
see if the motherboard and video card are fine. I don't know if the
livecd include the memttest

maybe the sata cable failed or the sata port where the disk is connected
failed, if you have a sata port free you can connect the hard drive in
it if using uuids in the partitions


Gabriel
  
I would also try these (not necessarily in order):
1.  reset you BIOS to defaults
2.  you should be able to boot a CD.  If you are trying a linux OS, try booting in single mode.  An install CD in text mode should come up with a bad disk unless the disk is really messing around with the rest of the system.
3.  try a fedora recovery disk.  when it asks about finding/mounting existing systems, say no.  then (assuming the disk is even seen) run the various smartctl commands and see what you can find out.
4.  just for grins, try booting a msdos floppy, if you have one and have a floppy drive.