Can older distro of RHEL (4.8) be forced to install on HP 8770W mobile workstation?
 

I have been trying to dual boot my HP 8770w mobile workstation with windows 7 and RHEL 4.8. The installer for a later version (RHEL 5.6) works just fine. However Some of our legacy systems use the older distribution, and I would very much like to have this installed. I have installed 5.6 with few issues but cannot for the life of me even get 4.8 to load. This leads me to believe it is a hardware issue, but would there be any way to force the install? After booting from a live CD the initialization hangs on:

[<c02b7701>] cpufreq_add_dev+0x2cd/0x452
[<c02b7a1f>] handle_update+0x0/0x5
[<c0258672>] cpufreq_register_driver+0x14b/0x271
[<c03dc75b>] do_initcalls+0x49/0x8e
[<c0100619>] init+0x0/0x1dd
[<c01006ca>] init+0xb1/0x1dd
[<c01041dd>] kernel_thread_helper+0x5/0xb

I can provide any information about the hardware configuration but the barebones system is here:

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/pscmi..._Datasheet.pdf

I assume that the hardware in this fairly new laptop is simply to new for the kernel of RHEL 4.8. You could try it with a newer kernel, but that is quite contrary to the aims of using a stable enterprise distribution.
If you really have to run RHEL 4.8 on those machines I would recommend to use a virtual machine for that.