[Gllug] hopeless debian install

[SteveC]

I'm trying to get debian on an old [but hardly used it seems] 
nobrand laptop

P1 mobile 233 MMX Genuine, 128 meg, 4 Gb drive, 1024x600

It has a floppy that runs off the par port and a CD off pcmcia. The 
debian boot floppies for stable or old-stable just crash crash crash all 
the time. I get variably 

unable to derefence pointer [crash]
unable to handle paging request [crash]
invalid operand 0000 [crash]

stable just crashes a few seconds into reading the root floppy 

Looking around I found that the pcmcia controller [O2Micro OZ6832/6833]
was flaky and indeed most of these crashes happened on the old-floppies
when trying to bring up the pcmcia. i can do this now by passing it
"irq_list=10,11,15 poll_interval=150" and leaving the network card out, 
then plugging that in.

I managed to get the base system installed that way and getting an
interface and grabbing packages off mirror.ac.uk . On updating [apt-get
dist-upgrade to testing] i got lots of crashes. I have run memtest86 for
a few hours and the memory checks out. I've tried chmod a-x
/etc/init.d/pcmcia so thats not there. and still i get crashes with the
machine up for only a minute or so.

its now crashed so badly the filesystem got totally mangled and i can't 
boot linux BUT windows runs just fine on it. It takes something like a 
million years to feed it all 6 floppies so I've left it for a while 
since it crashes so much.

oh, and its not the floppies I've tried three sets and it dies at the 
same point on the stable install...

Any ideas other than derefing the oopses and trying the kernel list?

have fun,

SteveC steve at fractalus.com http://www.fractalus.com/steve/
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