The symptoms were after a clean install of Fedora Core 6, and/or Red Hat 5 ( RHEL 5 ), the initial boot would hang at random places. Viewing the verbose output showed an error like:
  * Fatal Error Inserting apci_cpufreq 
  *  no such device acpi-cpufreq.ko
but NOT as the last lines of output -the kernel continues to load until it crashes, allowing this text to scroll off the screen.

WAIT! All of the following about architecture is PROBABLY correct, but i found a simpler solution to the problem. All I did was enter interactive startup (“I” on boot) and select “N” for irqbalance; i eventually removed it from startup, and now i’m problem free! 

The deal is, the i586 kernel is not compatible with multi-threads, and crashes on boot. Here’s the solution (i think) i reached:

1. Use the fedora cd to boot into rescue mode (make sure your installation is mounted).
2. Chroot into your install by typing “chroot /mnt/sysimage”
3. Check your kernel architechture by typing rpm -q kernel –qf ‘%{ARCH}\n’
4. If your architechture is i586, this upgrade might work for you!
5. type this: yum install kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.i686
6. with the new kernel installed, you should be able to boot, just to be safe, type “startx” to log into the x server as root, and run updates (you could do this from the command line too, but i was desperate to see x11!)
7. Restart and -HOPEFULLY- Fedora will boot properly.. this fix should also work for Red Hat 5.

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