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[A description of what I did, with a could of caveats marked with "NOTE WELL". Followed by some questions, for the wise.] Hi, I finally got Linux to install on my TP755, and I thought I'd share my experience, so that other could avoid spending several days at it. (0) My machine is a TP755CE, 8MB mem, 810MB disk, 2.88MB floppy. (1) I started with the Slackware 3.0 distribution, and found that, while I could get my Thinkpad to read the boot diskette, I could not, for the life of me, get it to read the root diskette -- it consistently complained about a read failure. (2) So I hunted around, and found the "minilinux" distribution -- a Linux which fits onto 4 floppy disks and unzips into your ms-dos filesystem. (3) I unpacked it, and fired it up. No sweat. Then I verified that I could indeed read the root floppy, by mounting it onto my machine on /dev/fd0. Again, no sweat. (4) Using the kernel in this distribution, I modified the "linux.bat" boot file and used it to boot the installation root-disk. Note that I did *not* use the installation *boot*-disk. (5) I installed as normal. However, there was *one* quirk. As others have related, the 810MB disk is a 784-cylinder, 32-head, 63-sector, disk. To boot the kernel for installation, though, you have to tell it: hd=1571,16,63 floppy=thinkpad [I also added "aha152x=0x340,11,7,1" for my Thinkpad Dock II SCSI CDROM] But when you now go and use Linux FDISK to partition your disk and set it up for Linux filesystem and swap, if you do a "v" (verify), it will complain *vociferously* about the partition table being inconsistent. The problem is that FDISK is using the current disk geometry, which you just set above to an erroneous value (since the disk has 32 heads, as you can verify if you use dparam.com (which you can find in the LILO distribution). SOOOOOO.... The right way to do this is ... fire up fdisk, and *before* partitioning, do: (a) drop into expert mode (x RET) (b) set the number of heads to 32 (h RET 32 RET) (c) set the number of cylinders to 784 (c RET 784 RET) (d) return to normal mode (r RET) (e) now partition away ! (6) Now you can install Linux, but [NOTE WELL] do *NOT* install LILO on the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your disk. Put LILO onto the boot-record of the Linux Filesystem partition you created. You will need to specify the same options that you did for booting the installation diskettes -- i.e., a *fake* disk geometry. You will find that LILO does *not* boot correctly. You will need to edit /etc/lilo.conf, and add lines like: disk = /dev/hda heads = 32 sectors = 63 cylinders = 784 (and then rerun "lilo") in order to get a bootable system. ---------------------------------------------------------------- OK. Enough of my description. The key point that I found was this: I could *not* read from the floppy drive with the Slackware 3.0 kernels. Not *one* of the boot-disks that I tried worked, nor did the installed kernel. The MINI-LINUX kernel, on the other hand, reads from the floppy just *fine*. I don't konw what's going on -- does anybody have any idea? Thanks in advance, --chet--