Which came first? Chicken or the egg?

[Jerry McBride]

I was given an old IBM Thinkpad 560E... it still works and has/had win98 on 
it. The windows install was riddled with virus and other non-sense and I 
would dearly love to put linux on this...

The problem is, no build in usb, floppy or cdrom. Yes, I have a pcmcia cdrom 
that can be used... but there's no way to start the linux install from it. 
Windows was so borked that it would not recognize the pcmcia hardware.

I tried taking the 2.5" HD out of the thinkpad and installing linux on it via 
another computer. Linux installs fine and even boots without an erro. 
However, when the HD is installed in the thinkpad, whether LILO or GRUB is 
used, the bootup stops just as the boot loader begins the kernel load. 

GRUB just loops (reboot, load grub, reboot) after grub shows it's menu and not 
a single error or complaint. 

LILO does pretty much the same thing, buts give an additional "bios error code 
0x99" which leads to google results of "use linear instead of lba32"... 
Change lba32 to linear, reload LILO to the MBR and still the same error. 

On a newer laptop, the HD boots perfectly.

Anyone have a suggestion how to get this old laptop running linux? I've about 
had it... 

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                             From the desk of:
                             Jerome D. McBride
                                       
   13:06:49 up 60 days, 19:13,  5 users,  load average: 0.12, 0.09, 0.03
 
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