So after many tries, I finally got 10 official installed. All it took was a BIOS update, re-downloading 2 of the CDs (I'll never forget to md5 sum my downloads again), and booting the kernel from the cd with "linux noapic nolapic" (thank you nForce2). And even then I would have random lockups after the license agreement, during package installation, etc. But it finally worked. And then I tried to boot it.

Everything was going quite well for the first bit. But then it read that it was replaying journal entries. I don't know how it is journal entires to replay... it's never booted before. But it always freezes there. (I think I gave it two minutes of no HD activity just in case.) I tried this with the default kernel and with the 2.6.3 option that the installer put into Grub. Same results.

Standard info:
XP 2500+ on Abit NF7-S v2 nForce2 chipset with latest bios update
1024MB PC3200 RAM
GF4 Ti4600 w/ 128 MB 8x AGP
120 GB Seagate 7200 SATA HD

hde5 mounted at / and formatted with ReiserFS
hde7 mounted at /home and formatted with Reiser FS

See if you can boot Installation CD1 and then hit F1 at the prompt, type

rescue

and hit enter. Then select 'Mount your partitions uner /mnt', then hit OK, then select 'Go to console' then type:

chroot /mnt
urpmi kernel-i686-up-4GB-2.6

Then remove the CD, boot normally and select that kernel to boot.

urpmi told me that that kernel was already installed (as I expected it would since it showed up in Grub... sorry I forgot to mention that). I didn't know how to remove it once it was installed, but I tried to boot it just for reference, and got the same error. Everything goes fine until it tries to replay the journal transactions.

Of course I am now getting error messages about my filesystems not being cleanly unmounted, but that was expected given the activity during lockup.