[tlug] Hang on Install with Laptop

[Charles Muller <acmuller@example.com>]

I had to get a new laptop for one of my projects, and couldn't stand to pay
the M$ tax one more time, so I bought a no-name (actually, named Clevo D400S)
laptop with no OS installed.

I've spent most of the past two days trying to get some kind of Linux
installed without success.

In RH9, the screen just goes blank after the first prompt. With RH8, I get a
little further, to the point where it says "Initializing PC Card Devices..."
and it hangs.

In both cases, I tried all of the switches suggested, including "noprobe",
"text", "lowres", etc., and then a few suggested on the Red Hat lists, such
as "nousb", "nodma", "noapmd", etc., with no change.

So I tried Mandrake 9.1, got a few screens into install, but got hung up at a
message that says "Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk.  This is
probably an hardware error while reading the data. (this may be caused by a
hardware failure or a Linux kernel bug)."

I found this in the Mandrake Cooker help files, but with no solution given.

Any suggestions for strategies? Windows2000 installed fine, and the ISO CDs
work OK on other machines.

Chuck


---------------------------
Charles Muller  <acmuller@example.com>
Faculty of Humanities,  Toyo Gakuen University
Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary [http://www.acmuller.net]
H-Buddhism List Editor [http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~buddhism/]
Mobile Phone: 090-9310-1787