Long standing trouble installing x86_64

I purchased a Pogolinux Altura64 workstation that came with Fedora
Core. Being a longtime Mandrake user I thought that it woujld be
trivial to get this system running with MDK.

Sadly I have spent about 16 hours working on this system with both
10.1 and 10.2 without getting past the same point.

The installer program hangs at the point of "Looking for available packages". 

I have tried this with several combinations of the following parameters:
text
alt1
alt0
ide=nodma 
noapic 
nolapic 
noiopic 
acpi=off

I know that it sees and can access both the cdrom and the SATA hard
disk because a secondary boot partition has been formatted. Also I can
boot in rescue mode and mount my old partitions.

I would be open to doing a raw rpm install if that would work... I'm
sick of Fedora

~drdreff