Also, slightly different problem, but yesterday I tried installing Arch on my laptop and it wouldn't even boot from the USB drive. ("waiting for boot device" and then dropping me to a shell) I tried two other USB drives, but again, neither worked. I did find a workaround for that on some blog (soft-linking something in the filesystem to the actual USB drive) but it didn't help. I'm beginning to think I'm cursed.
Did you change the USB drive name? I shit you not. The anme of the USB stick should be ARCH_$DATE where $DATE is the date of the iso release:
for example for the iso: archlinux-
2011.08.19-netinstall-i686.iso
the usb stick has to be named: ARCH_20110819
Try to see if that works.
In other news, I just discovered an awesome linux hosting seller, perfect to do as much testing as you want.
It's a mini server, virtualized and it only costs 2€ per month. You have total access to the box because it doesn't matter what you do with it as it's virtualized
Also it has a nice control panel so you can reinstall Centos/Ubuntu/Debian/Suse with one click and have a fresh start.
Of course the thing is way too small for a big project so it's more like a sandbox playground.
1x 2,5GHZ, RAM-MAX 256MB, DISKSPACE 5GB, BANDWIDTH 250GB/MONTH
I got myself one in order to test different shit and it's awesome to be able to 1-click refresh the machine and start over. Also I tried with apache2+mysql+php and idling at 67Mb which isn't bad at all.
vps-world.eu
root@itxaka:~# uname -a
Linux itxaka 2.6.32-042stab037.1 #1 SMP Fri Sep 16 22:18:06 MSD 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
root@itxaka:~# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 11.04
Release: 11.04
Codename: natty
root@itxaka:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 262144 28264 233880 0 0 13928
-/+ buffers/cache: 14336 247808
Swap: 262144 3400 258744
Also it seems to have a nice download tube!
root@itxaka:~# wget --output-document=/dev/null
http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip
--2011-12-30 15:44:47--
http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip
Resolving speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com... 208.43.102.250
Connecting to speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com|208.43.102.250|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 524288000 (500M) [application/zip]
Saving to: `/dev/null'
100%[===================================================================================================================>] 524,288,000 15.6M/s in 40s
2011-12-30 15:45:27 (12.6 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [524288000/524288000]