8.0.3 upgrade and fresh install fail from CD

[troby]

I tried upgrading my 8.0.0 system to 8.0.3 using the CD. It appeared to go smoothly until the final screen, when I was unable to get the Reboot option to work - it just kept refreshing the menu but not rebooting. After several attempts I powered the system off and rebooted. The boot process failed saying it was unable to find the root partition. Next I tried returning to the previous 8.0.0 installation on the same flash card but it also failed to boot.

Finally I tried a fresh 8.0.3 install on a different USB flash - it boots up to a "mountroot>" prompt and then panics if anything is entered. This installation went smoothly except at the very end when writing the flash it spent about 15 minutes at 98.8% complete, saying it was still trying to write an image size of about 1GB, but it finally quit and I was able to reboot from the menu. I have tried rebooting several times but always hang on the mountroot prompt.

 

[troby]

A few more points: this was 32bit. The original flash card on which I tried to upgrade was 1GB. Maybe that's not big enough to do an upgrade, but it didn't complain about running out of space. The second new card for the fresh install was 2GB.
I am now going to try a 64bit installation from CD on different hardware, on a 4GB card.

 

[troby]

The 64bit install fails as soon as it displays the initial boot menu and moves on to booting. The system immediately resets and drops back to the BIOS. I tried removing all devices except the CD with the same result. I downloaded and burned a fresh copy with the same result. I tried disabling APIC and selecting the noAPIC boot option with the same result.
This is an AMD A740G chipset with an SB700 southbridge, Athlon X2 64 cpu, 4GB RAM.