Laptops :: Booting problem on Toshiba Satellite 1800 514



Hi and thank in advance,
I've got a second hand laptop (Celeron 1 GHz, 384 MB ram, 15 GB hd) with a fully working xp installation.
I've formatted everything to install linux. I've tested hd searching for bad sectors: everything fine.
I use GAG as boot loader (easy and well working)
I've been able to install on separate partitions Slackware 10.1 and Fedora Core 5. They are working well (even if a little bit too slow due to sw amount).
I've created a separate partition ( 16 MB) for my boot program (GAG) on hd  beginning  then a 800MB (swap partition) and two partitions: one for slackware and one for FD core5.
I tried to create also a 5 GB fat32 partition but it seem there are some trouble on partitioning, neither Slack nor FC recognise it (probably my fault).
Then I've tried with DSL  3.0.1 (no hd installation) but  during booting laptop hangs displaying:

Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab...

it stops completely (i've wait for an hour...)
not possible to open other consoles, it does non respond to keyboard..... stuck. Only solution is: switch off.
I've tried with (at least) following options (as single or multiple):

frame buffer
toram
failsafe
base
minimal
legacy

Nothing to do.... same messagge, same behaviour.
Any suggestion?

Try

nofstab

bootcode.

I have a Toshiba 1800 and to use DSL I have to enter
dsl xsetup at boot, then choose running with framebuffer not with the vesa server for the X-Windows.

I hope these can help you.

First of all: thank cdbagger01 and pega2k, I had to use both of your suggestion: nofstab & xsetup to make DSL booting.
IT'S RUNNING ON RAM NOW!!
May I ask you some more help?
I wanted to install it on hd.
During boot I skipped hd (nofstab) so I don't know how to tell dsl to make a new partition on it, fdisk simply say there is no hd...
AGAIN thank in advance for help
Nanosnom

if slack or fedora are working, what does the partiton table look like in fdisk?
you can have 4 primary partitions or 3 primary plus an extended partition which you can then furthur split into logical partitions. Linux should recognise these.

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