"Supported Hardware

SliTaz GNU/Linux supports all machines based on the i486 or x86 Intel compatible processors. A minimum 192MB of memory is recommended to use the core LiveCD. 80MB is needed for the "slitaz-loram" flavor and 16MB for the "slitaz-loram-cdrom" flavor. "


I'd run memtest then on this to see if memtest reports 64M ram.

I have run the loram-cd on a vm but it failed at around 20M ram so I think your disk ought to work if you made it at the slowest speed and with a high quality disk. And that you did get the cd loram iso about 163M size.

Since it dont seems clear for me what can be done with a 64MB RAM, personally I would not spend much brain activity on such a laptop configuration but have a look immediatly for an upgrade.
It seems a 512MB RAM is available for USD 12,00
This is not a shame to try this.
I would.
Then you can choose quietly a distro.

The problem in this thread seems to be that the people either are not reading or are not understanding what was written.
Slitaz in the slitaz-loram-cdrom will work without problems on a machine with 64MB RAM (although anything that runs in RAM wouldn't be my choice on a low-RAM machine, but anyways).
The problem here is that the OP uses for some reason unknown to me an USB drive to boot the machine. And this is exactly the only reason why it doesn't work. The boot routine of slitaz-loram-cdrom is searching for Slitaz on a CD-ROM, not on an USB device. It will simply not work from USB, just because it can't find the necessary files to mount them to the file-system.
Use a CD-ROM instead of USB and it will work.

Oh,, sorry for the reading (the screen copy was too small).
Another reason? I could boot an old PC with slitaz 3.0 (from USB) and not slitaz 4.0

USB install structure for slitaz 3.0 is hereunder (modify the directories if you want; ext2 USB, extlinux was installed with TinyCoreLinux, the slitaz files were extracted from the ISO and copied manually to the USB and NOT with unetbootin, multiboot extlinux for several distro). Adapt the boot code for your grafic card, keyboard etc.

... extract ...
LABEL slitaz DE
MENU LABEL slitaz DE
KERNEL /boot/slitaz/bzImage
APPEND rw root=/dev/null quiet kmap=de-latin1 vga=791 sound=no modprobe=mga lang=en acpi=off tz=localtime
INITRD /boot/slitaz/rootfs.gz
....

I should have stated this more clearly in post #3.

"Such old system is a poor choice to attempt a plop and slitaz usb boot."

Any of the testing later should have been tried from booting to a CD and not the plop to usb.

This post sounded like it needs another addressing. I successfully installed DAMN SMALL LINUX, not Slitaz. As two others said here, Slitaz is buggy on old hardware. I was trying to revive a very similar system as OP using slitaz. It just does not work, or I should say seems too temperamental, even on a newer more robust laptop I tested it on.

If you have an old PC and wish to experiment with, use it for something and do not know Linux well, I STRONGLY suggest using either Puppy Linux or as I said earlier, Damn Small Linux. Both these OS have lots of great software and I am currently writing this using my Damn Small Linux 4.11 on an old PC with only 64MB ram and NO HARD DRIVE! It is running off the CD at boot, then I direct it to my thumb drive where I have DSL parked.

Hope that helps someone, because IMHO Slitaz is just too buggy to mess with.

Just sharing for those who are using SliTaz.

I have SliTaz installed on my pc and it was giving me a kernel panic error or can't find root. It was solved by adding "rootdelay=8" on boot command:

edit your grub configuration file and it should look something like this when done.
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.37-slitaz rootdelay=8 root=/dev/sda1