Machine is Compaq Armada 4131t laptop with 80Mg RAM and 2Gb drive. Amigo Linux 2.0 recognizes the drive as hda1 (IBM-DTNA-22160, ATA DISK drivce) and the CD-ROM as hdb (COMPAQ CRD-S311, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM device. Typical Compaq Diags have been removed so the only partition is FAT16.
If I boot from the hard drive (dos 6.22) and run linux.bat from c:\linux, the following messages appear then the machine freezes:
VFS: Mounted root (umsdos filesystem).
Freeing unused kernel memory: 144k freed
UMSDOS_notify_change: run/utmp not in EMD, ret=-2
UMSDOS_notify_change: etc/ioctl.save not in EMD, ret=-2

If I boot with the Amigo boot disk and a rescue disk, I can mount the drive and see the file system and poke around.

Thanks in advance for any help and suggestions.

This could possibly because of it being a FAT 16 instead of FAT 32. Are you creating the partition with fdisk from windows, DOS or Linux?
I've only seen the above rare umsdos error once...

Have you tried re-installing?

Thanks, re-fdisked with Win95 and reinstalled on FAT32. Next step is to install a wireless card and setup adsl connection.
Thanks again for your help.

BTW, a nice tool to have around is a Win98 boot floppy, for creating and formatting partitions. You can even (google it!) replace the fdisk with a microsoft-patched fdisk for win98 that will handle disks over 64GB!