Installation tips for Thinkpad 770?

[leegross@us.ibm.com]

I am in the process of upgrading from a Thinkpad 760C to a 770 and have
been experiencing problems installing Debian on the 770.  I have tried
installing from DOS but the system panics when it tries to mount the root
filesystem:

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Partition check:
 hda: hda1 hda2 < hda5 hda6 >
[MS-DOS FS Rel. 12,FAT 0,check=n,conv=b,uid=0,gid=0,umask=022,bmap]
[me=0x0,cs=0,#f=0,fs=0,fl=0,ds=0,de=0,data=0,se=0,ts=0,ls=0,rc=0,fc=4294967
295]
Transaction block size = 512
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:00

The same thing occurs if I use the tecra resc1440.bin file.

I also tried to boot from floppy disk.  When I tried to boot from the tecra
rescue disk the system hangs with:

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boot:
Loading root.bin.............
Loading linux..............
A20 gating failed

If I boot from the normal rescue disk, the machine reboots itself after
loading linux.  Using "boot: linux floppy=thinkpad" makes no difference.  I
also tried booting my old 760C laptop with the same rescue disks and it
seemed to work fine (I got to the first menu box).

I am out of ideas.  This laptop has 96MB of memory, and about 2GB of disk
space available for linux.  Any suggestions?  Thank you.

Lee