Please help.

Any help from the pro is appreciated since I am running out solution.

I have installed the Suse 7.3 Pro on the HP Pavilion desktop as a test, it was smoothly without any hitch. But when I tried on my LAPTOP HP ze5170 I ran into the problem described below. The procedure I used is exactly the same when I installed on my desktop.

HW -

HP Pavilion Laptop ze5170
2.0 gigahertz pentium 4 (i586 arch) processor
512 MB DDR RAM
40 Gig Hard Drive
CD-RW/DVD ROM
Graphics Card ATI mobility M6
15 in. screen @ 1024x768
3 USB ports
1 PS/2 port
10/100 Ethernet card (nat. semiconductor)
Conexant 56K modem.

SW - Suse 7.3 Pro

Problems encountered -

1) Used BootING to resized WinXP to 22GB - ~18GB left for Linux

2) Boot SuSE, used YaST2 to partition the extended into 7 partitions,
(I had tried ReiserFS and EXT3 - no help)

/ (root)
/swap
/boot
/var
/home
/opt
/usr

3) Chose packages, etc.... Then when SuSE confirmed ready to install,
it began to prepare the hard drive for installation, it FAILED randomly
(because I have tried to install 4 times) to format different partition,
/var, /swap, /home, etc... each installation

Remedies I have tried without success --

a) Reinstall SuSE multiple times - no help
b) Used BootING to format and clean wipe the extended partition multiple times - no help
c) Look into BIOS to see if there is any thing I can change, all it has is the disk size.
d) Played with different file format, ReiserFS and EXT3 - No help


Any suggestion??

Disable power management in the bios would be a good first step, at least for the duration of the installation. ACPI causes headaches during Linux installs IMO.

Get yourself a copy of SuSE 9, it runs well on the pavilion laptops. Mine is the ze4230 and SuSE 9 Pro works like a charm.