Hi,

This is my first time with Debian, so I've been trying a debian testing net install on my old laptop, but I think everything went smoothly. Right up until the point that it refused to boot, that is. The final message I get is 'spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7.'. That's it, no kernel panic or anything. I did a search, and it seems like that error shouldn't be causing my system to lock. The only other things of note are some insmod errors with my networking modules, but I can't see how those would stop the startup in its tracks.

I've tried using both the 2.4.27-1-386 and the recovery kernels, but I get exactly the same results. Previously I had a Gentoo install on the same laptop which worked perfectly with a 2.6.7 kernel.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

reinstall with linux26 at the boot prompt (hit F3 to get the correct syntax--I may have that wrong). This installs a 2.6 kernel for ya...