I am new to all of this and i don't know whats going on. i have loaded SuSE 8.1 and everytime in safemode it gets to "PCMCIA kernel" it just stops. i can get a boot with the install disk and linking to new install and then enter reinstall with boot help. the system its on is a presario 2176rs. under normal bootup it goes to,
"partition check:
hda:"
i have no clue whats going on here....do you?

The first question I would ask is: "why are you trying to boot into safemode?"
The second question I would ask is: since it hangs on partition check, did you partition the hard disk before trying to install SuSE?
The act of partitioning sets the size of the partition and filesystem format for the operation system you propose to install. For any distro of Linux, you need a minimum of two partitions.
1- a swap partition equal to or greater than the amount of ram in the computer.
2- at least one partition formated for Linux.
In that you have the following choices:
a- format for native Linux ext2.
b- format for Linux ext3 (ext2 with journalling capability, which makes recovery from corrupted files which would normally prevent successful boot much easier).
c- format for one of the other journalling filesystems, such as reiserFS, JFS, etc.
It's also possible to create and format several partitions, so that you could install several distros, each to it's own partition, or one distro spread over several partitions (all with only one swap partition).

So, read this. Mull it over. Then, if you could supply more info on how you went about installing SuSE, it might help us to help you.

i was booting in safe to see if i could make the load go smother. first very first thing i did was format 13.9g using NTFS for XP-pro. after that i booted comp from the suse disk. i auto formated from the disk. it put 377MB in one partition and 13.6g in the other.