debian installation disks hang with Thinkpad

[Cheryl Homiak <chomiak@chartermi.net>]

I have a t23 thinkpad from iBM. When I try using the x86 vanilla flavor kernel
in the woody installation 9rescue and boot) floppies, my laptop appears to hang
after the kernel loads. Since I am blind, I can't tell you where it hangs or
what the screen says--just that the floppy drive makes all the appropriate
sounds when loading the rescue disk but nothing happens when I put in the root
disk. The floppies aren't defective; they work fine on my desktop computer. I do
have an installed linux system on the Thinkpad, and I can load my vanilla 2.4.19
by floppy and it works just fine.
Do I need other parameters for the rescue disk or do I need to use another
flavor or later version of installation floppy? Woody's default kernel is
2.2.20.
Thanks.

Cheryl