I sent a note to info@Paldo.org saying how much I like the distro -- I still do but there's a problem now.

I repartitioned all the primary partitions on my hard drives for RAID (two IDE, two SATA) thinking maybe I would install Paldo there. My boot partition is still the same -- not my first BIOS drive (/dev/hda) but third (/dev/sda3).

There is a message at boot 'invalid superblock etc' -- I didn't build the raid yet -- and then CD fails to boot. Why should it, anyway? It goes to "virgin login" -- then won't accept 'root' or 'paldo' as a user.

Very mysterious that LiveCD must find a mountable first partition before it boots, there's no reason why it should unless...

Have you already set the RAID partitions to type 0xfd (Linux RAID autodetect)? If that's the case I assume that it tries to find the RAID superblock on these partitions but it can't as you haven't built the RAID array yet. It _should_ still boot from CD, maybe the login problems are not caused by the RAID warnings.

What's the exact error message when you're trying to login with username "root" and password "paldo"?

When you start the LiveCD (or Installer CD) and you see the grub bootloader press the "E" key twice to edit the first bootline. Add nodmraid to the line and hit enter. Press the "B" key for booting. With nodmraid the raiddetection is disabled. We added this feature because of me. My second harddrive gots detected as raid but it wasn't.

If you installed the Installer CD via my installer to your hdd the user account is: user - user (as pw) and the root account is still: root - paldo or the settings you entered.

thanks for the tips ... 'nodmraid' did not work on its own . The message where the installer CD hanged for a minute or so read, roughly,

#HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for
#
#ata_id:[2754]:main: /dev/tmp_8-0
# " [2757]: " " /tmp.8-48

and so on for all four hard drives. This occurred even after I repartitioned to remove the partitions marked as RAID.

I checked the bios and found that RAID was still enabled in the BIOS -- even though RAID was not enabled individually for any of the four hard drives (i.e., was explicitly disabled for all hard drives). So I disabled RAID itself in the BIOS. The same message 'HDIO_GET_IDENTITY' appeared again exactly as above -- but the CD eventually booted.

What happened before was, after the previous 'HDIO_GET_IDENTITY' messages,

#starting message dbus..

...[some other stuff]...

#paldo stable 2.6.20-11(x86_64)
#virgin login:

from there no login was accepted -- not root, paldo or user. Whatever was typed brought "incorrect username or password" -- or something like that,
repeated five times automatically, followed by "maximum number of tries (5) exceeded".

Anyway, liveCD runs now -- any idea what caused this bug?

Seems you only tried the stable livecd. I found this:

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2006-12/msg04588.html

Maybe it is fixed in the newer kernel 2.6.21.1 the testing branch uses.
You can download the testing livecd or one of my installer cds if you wanna test if the new kernel fixes your problem. Even the boot cd will be enough for testing, if you don't wanna download to much.