I have an IBM Thinkpad Model 9552-301 (486 CPU/8meg ram/117 meg HD) that I am trying to install Linux on.

The MCA Linux pages haven't been updated in years.

I've tried booting floppy based linux on it as well as Dragon Linux and mu-Linux and others but none can see the hard drive.

Any suggestions on how I can load linux on this thing?

Thanks

Try Slack81.zip if you want to run on Linux partitions. Keep in mind that with such a small hard drive, you will only be able to ins tall a very minimal system.
Basic Linux and Grey cat Linux are also good distros for older machines. They run from the DOS FAT partition and use loopback to minimize disk usage. If you are relatively new to Linux I would suggest Basic Linux. It has PCMCIA support a minimal X installation and is easy to install.
Good Luck.

After many attempts, I have managed to ALMOST load Debian 2.1 on the thinkpad.

Debian is the only distro to readily recognize the MCA drives. Debian 3.0 needs 12 meg ram so I went back one distro and sure enough, 2.1 only needs 4 meg.

It had a problem trying to fdisk them, but I was able to switch to a second console and do it manually (2 partitions, one linux native, one linux swap) so the install went fine from there until it got to LILO install.

It is currently having a problem with LILO. I am going through the LILO how to document to try and solve this, but except for booting, it looks like I have a limited but working linux installed.

Thanks.