For the first time ever, or at least that I know of, an Arch installation CD has refused to start on my erstwhile-bulletproof Inspiron. The symptoms are rather unusual — a freeze during the udev sequence that results in a hard lock — but consistent, with several different burns of several different 2009-02 ISOs all failing at the same point.
I’ll have to search around for a solution, but to be honest, I have little reason to. One of the beautiful things about Arch is that I can jump straight to current regardless of the installation CD I use, and this isn’t the first time a particular release has acted peculiarly on a specific machine.
Nothing lost. Download the previous release, install across FTP, and I reach the exact same point, with only a slight delay. I can live with that.
It’s unfortunate that there’s a bit of a glitch on this machine — the one that introduced me to Arch Linux. And I hadn’t seen an Arch CD ever that wouldn’t at least reach the cursor prompt on it. But like I said … nothing lost.
