I just got a Thinkpad 770z. I wanted to try something different so I thru on Debian 3.0. I got sick of the crazy ways Debian does things and decided to go back to my first love, Slack. I downloaded 10.2 and booted the laptop to Disk 1. I press ENTER to load default image, then enter to accept US keyboard layout. ENTER to get into root. I already had my partitions set up from Debian so I got to try "setup". It says "No such file or directory". Then I try fdisk and it renders:

attempt to access beyond end of device
01:00 rw=0, want=1073825997, limit 6464
blah
blah
blah
...
segmentation fault

Then I do a cfdisk and it says:
Can't Open cfdisk.bin

Ideas?

That is strange, but worst case scenario is that your discs might be corrupted do to a bad download or burn, try downloading the 10.2 isos again, either from a different source, and also try using a different program to write the isos to the cds. Other than that if you still have trouble, then it might be your laptop, but I highly doubt that, since you managed to get debian on there in the first place, but anyways, just try redownloading the isos again, and see what happens.

I can't imagine it being the CD because the boot.i image loaded OK and the MD5 validation checks out. Could it have something to do with having my swap partition located before my boot partition on the HD?

I don't know why that would be an issue, I wouldn't think that linux would care where the swap partition is located, as long as there is one, but if that is the case, try rerunning cfdisk again, and reformat the drive completely, and place the swap partition after your linux partition, and make sure they are both primary, not logical/extended

Its definantly not the CD because I threw it into another laptop and it ran fine.

It can't get into cfdisk... or fdisk...

Booted to debian, ran CFDISK, deleted all partitions, rebooted to Slack CD and get the same non-sense. Anyone have thoughts?

try to clean up the bootsector.
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

( never do this when a disk contains any data you want to keep )

egag

0+0 records in
0+0 records out

Same errors. Thanks for the idea.

-----------
attempt to access beyond end of device
01:00 rw=0, want=1073825997, limit 6464
blah
blah
blah
------------

do you still get that error ?

what kind of disk is that ?
makes me think it's not using lba when it should...

egag

This may be dumb and if I am wrong, sorry, but it is a thought.......................have you tried throwing a different stick of memory in. Yes, I am somewhat of a

For a 770X I have/understand without knowing why to set the bios to NOT use "fast boot". Doubt if bios setting is the answer as same setting works with one distro but not another but ..... worth a try

ppd

Yes I am still getting that same error verbatim.
I will toy with BIOS.
I have no memory to swap with, but I don't think it is a RAM issue.
I will look up specs on the laptop and see what type of disk it has.

You might also want to look at the HCL entries on this forum. You may find something there. (Note, please, that this is a suggestion only. I have not looked in the HCL, and don't know what, if anything, is there for your specific hardware.)

I installed Slack 9.1 with ZERO problems. Weird. Thanks for the help!