I have a brand new Sony GRT Vaio laptop, and i've tried installing several different distro's, although i would prefer to put slack on my machine. i've tried rh9, and even knoppix won't work (it says : unknown bus type 2).

what's puzzling, is that i can't even boot the bare.i kernel to install a distro now, whereas before i could install but hadn't booted into one because i had some partition/LILO work to be done.

so nothing hardware wise has changed, but this pci device just hangs my machine all the time.

some specs:

1.8 ghz celeron
512 RAM
40 gig hdd, 5 gig primary 'rescue partition' and 5 gig ntfs (xp home), and 20 gig ntfs part
dvd±r/rw drive (dwu-50a)
geForce 420 go w/32MB ram
ambit lan-express 802.11 integrated mini-pci
memory stick/Magic Gate slot , 3 usb 2.0 and one 1394 port

i remember once, when i was installing slack, that it lost the cdrom drive hdc, and i had to manually tell it where the cd was, but then it worked fine...that happened twice or so...

i know emperor linux (emperorlinux.com) sells a grt with linux on it, and i know that this is come kind of new ailment. i just beg for help, because xp is so damn ridiculous in day to day operation, and i need to get back home...

thanks in advance.

I have a Vaio PCG-GRT390Z. I was running Fedora Core 2 with the 2.6.6.xx.xx.smp kernel. I had the same error as you. If you hit enter after the screen goes blank, it comes back. Once I got far enough to get X to start coming up, but it took nearly 45 minutes. I did a bit of research. Try adding pci=noacpi to your boot parms. If that doesn't work, try noacpi (without the pci=). I was at work and needed my machine desperately, so I ended up re-installing which fixed it, but I lost all of my data (not a big loss, just got the machine 4 days ago). So, fwiw, I hope it helps.