Linux on HP ze5300 laptop

[phlatline]

I have a HP ze5300 with
P4 @ 1.8GHz
512MB SDRAM
40gig HD
XP preinstalled
I have been trying for a wk now to get RedHat Linux 8.0 installed on a seprate partition, but the system keeps hanging during install.
I have removed XP, deleted partitions, diabled USB in BIOS, uninstalled damn near every drive, & still it hangs. WTF?
Is there anyway I can make RedHat work? If not, is there a version of Linux out there that will work?
Thanx for any help you can give.

have you tried a copy of knoppix?

http://www.knoppix.org/

[CMonster]

apic may be the culprit -try disabling all apm in BIOS

or try these kernel boot parameters:

*linux nodma
*linux noapic
*linux nousb
*linux apm=off
*linux nopcmcia

or more than one:

*linux nodma noapic nousb apm=off nopcmcia

or give Mandrake / SuSE a try, both of which I believe have "failsafe" kernel options that include conservative boot options.

Once the basic system is installed you can experiment with adding the services back one at a time to see which one is the culprit. I had the same problem with my laptop, Fujitsu Lifebook Series C

[phlatline]

I'll try that. I'll come back later & tell you how it goes.
Thanx!

[HaroldW]

phlatline:

In case you are still trying to install, first I suggest you go to RedHat 9.0 or Fedora. They are newer releases with more drivers. As far as the lockup during the install, someone mentioned turning off power management (ACPI) I found with my HP ze4540us that I could not get the expert (install) mode to load, so I could use the noacpi switch. For me and my ze4540us what got it going was using a USB keyboard for the install only. When the system came up after copying files, configuring devices and rebooting it began loading RedHat 9.0 for the first time then it errored during the video check, I ran the configuration program again and after I changed the monitor from unprobed monitor to Generic Laptop Display panel 1024 x 768, RedHat 9.0 finished loading. After the install was complete I was able to remove the keyboard and everything worked fine.

Someone later told me If I had disabled "legacy usb support" in the bios I would not have had to use the USB keyboard. However, since I already had a working install I did not want to do another, just to test that.