If I pass 'acpi=force' as a kernel argument (BTW My boot loader is GRUB), it stills comes up with the error about the BIOS age being too old.

I would have thought that that error would be surpressed if I have taken measures to correct it and they have worked, otherwise, I'm still stuck with a laptop that won't boot most of the time.

My grub config says this for booting the kernel:

Suppose there is a good thing to it freezing at initializing network, I get time to type that out :P

dunno sorry. might be worth starting a new thread with that at the title seeing as this has gone off topic and hopefully somone else can help.
sorry and good luck in you quest

Many thanks. Just to let you/people know I used 'dmesg | less' to read booting information (I believe anyway) and the acpi=force does work (the line under it in the dmesg says 'ACPI override' and there are multiple references to it throughout)

And your right, the BIOS no longer freezes when I reboot. Going to start a new thread regarding the locking at the network part.

Thank for all your help, much appreciated.

Well, i just hpe someone reads this old thread. I too tried the crazy method of installation as what was done earlier in this thread. i removed my old laptops hard drive, installed Suse10.0 onto it and dumped it back onto my laptop. Grub loaded beautifully with the options to boot Linux or XP ( i have XP on hda1 and Linux on hda3 and hda5 for swap ). however when i start Suse it quits halfway through the bootup with the errors i have no clue to proceed. the console it dumps me into hardly has any functional commands ( cant even do ls ) and most of the directories dont exist.

having read this complete thread ( i read only half of it when i started ) i was wondering can the problem be with Suse itself? should i instead go ahead an install FC4 on my laptop? Xyem, you did get it to function after all dint u so could it be the prob with the distro ??

thanx for any help u guys acn give.

might be your laptop not being supported by suse. try another distro definately

i found http://www.linux-laptop.net/ is useful. also try the HCL on this site to see if theres any postings. it doesn't sound like its really much to do with the way you installed it. could be a grub config error tho. how far does it get before the errors. i know you said half way but whats it done and whats it not done and does it say before those errors what it was doing?

thanx for the reply mate. for starters fedora is able to start UDEV and miraculously locates the hardware ( storage, network & audio ) after that the screen flashes and then is shows the line "Configuring kernal parameters:" and for the past few minutes doesnt make a move. i cant detect any activity in the hard disk so i hope something is happening and it simply hasnt just crashed. gonna leave it for the whole night ad check back in the morning.