That was it! .mntcheck was missing from /images/dev. Thank you!

Actually it was pretty straightforward to get working on FC17 -

Follow instructions found in other posts for Fedora Core 16 (Remove php-gettext from the install file, fix the NFS-server start so it won’t break the install process) Replace &$tmp with $tmp Start the NFS-server / enable the nfs-server

I just successfully re-imaged a computer 😄