installing sarge from hard drive on libretto110ct

[Liudmila Yafremava <yafrmava@uiuc.edu>]

Hello!

I have been trying to install Sarge on Toshiba Libretto 110ct
 for weeks with no success. I gravely need someone to take me
through it, as I feel that I've tried everything and can't
think of anything else to do.

The laptop had an empty hard drive and external PCMCIA
floppy and cd drives. It cannot boot from cd drive, only
from floppy or hard drive. I installed dos on it and
formatted the hard drive. At first, I tried to do an install
using only floppies. I made attempts to install both potato
and sarge that way, with the same result: after booting with a
linux boot floppy, the machine demands a root floppy but
never releases the floppy drive (it continues to spin). When,
ignoring that, I pull the boot floppy and replace it with the
root floppy, it responds with a bunch of queer messages and
"unable to mount root floppy" etc. Somewhere I read that
initial linux boot floppy does not have the pcmcia drivers
on it, so the machine may not be able to communicate with
its floppy in such an install. Correct me if I am wrong.

So, after a lot of messing around I installed windows 3.1
and pcmcia cdrom drivers for dos which allowed me to copy
the whole debian disk 1 onto the harddrive. I followed the
instructions in the installation manual for a hard drive
install. I copied loadlin, vmlinuz, initrd.gz and the .iso
file for the 1st of the sarge install cds onto c:\ and
tried installing linux by invoking

loadlin c:\vmlinuz root=/dev/ram rw initrd=c:\initrd.gz.

This results in scanning of vmlinuz and initrd, with a bunch
of boot messages and finally

cramfs: wrong magic
kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 01:00.

I tried changing the root= parameter, I downloaded
vmlinuz and initrd.gs from sarge's hd-media subfolder,
but all that results in kernel panic and inability to mount
root fs. I copied root.img onto c:\ with no results.

I tried using sbm to tell the laptop to boot from the cd,
but sbm cannot see the device. I guess it is not an ide.

I know I am pretty clueless when it comes to linux, but
I have installed debian on a few machines before, and I am
able to follow the instructions.. What am I missing? I am
stumped. Please help.


Thanks,
Luda