laptop install problems

From: WCH (whexeterDELETEthisPART_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 04/25/04 

Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2004 13:37:42 GMT

I'm trying to install Linux to an older laptop so I can learn how to use it.
I've got a Toshiba Portege 3110CT with 128MB RAM and a 9GB drive that I used
PartitionMagic to create a 5GB Linux partition. I bought a copy of SAMS
"Teach Yourself Red Hat Linux Fedora" (other of their guides have worked for
me) which came with two "Fedora Core Publisher's Edition" CDs. I don't want
to just install Linux and stumble around the GUI, I want to understand at
least a little about command line and file management and the underlying
processes.

My laptop can't boot to a CD-ROM. OK, I used dosutils to create a bootdisk
and booted from the floppy. Good so far. Then I used dosutils to create a
pcmcia image on a floppy, which I put in when the install asked for a
drivers disk in order to install from a CD-ROM (which it couldn't find).
That worked, too.

Then, as I could see lights on the CD-ROM (it's an external drive) and hear
it spinning, I got error messages saying"error 2 reading header: cpio: bad
magic" and "exec of anaconda failed Bad address install exited abnormally"
along with termination messages.

I turned off the laptop, cleaned the CD (just in case) and used compressed
air to blow out the CD drive. Tried everything again (and again), same
result.

Then I thought maybe I had bad media so I got on the Mandrake site,
downloaded the images for Mandrake 9.1 and tried that. Their pcmcia floppy
disk is bootable, so I was able to go straight from first floppy to my
CD-ROM, but when it read the CD-ROM it generated error messages saying
"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)." The only button choice is OK, after which it says I
can't recover from this so reboot.

The CD-ROM is an external pcmcia device made by Port. It works perfectly in
Windows. It is able to detect whether the CD-ROM in the drive is what the
software on the floppy expects to see. Beyond that, though, I can't tell if
it's defective in some way, and I don't have another compatible CD-ROM
drive.

I'd really like to get Linux installed on this laptop, but I'm at impasse.
Sorry for the long post, trying to provide enough specifics to get good
advice. Any help appreciated.
WC

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