Problem with pavilion ze4200 siries

[Roman_25]

first, I got to tell that I'm new to Linux.
I'm trying to instal linux (RedHat v8 and/or 9) on my laptop (pavilion ze4210) and runing into several problems: when I boot from cd into the instalation menu (where u choose language) keyboard and cd does not work. With keyboard I managed to come up with one "cheat" - I used usb-keyboard and everything turned out just fine, but with cd-rom ... well I dont have usb-dc-rom and I dont want to pay like 100$ for it just to instal Linux :Well, I heard that there are lots of problems with that particular laptop, but maybe someone knows any ways arround that error.
Thanks

[Jean-Pierre Denis]

Hi,

do you have a network card in your laptop ?

You could try a network install but since you are new to linux you could have some problem.

Try contacting you local Linux User Group, maybe they could help you out.

Thanks,
JP

[Bruce Copeland]

Three suggestions:

1) Check

http://www.tuxmobil.org/hp.html
http://www.linux-on-laptops/hp.html

to see if you can find a page by someone who has already installed on a ze4200 (or similar) series.

2) Search earlier messages on this archive. (I know that at least a couple of people have reported successful installations of RH8 on ze4200 series.)

3) Try installing using the boot parameters nopcmcia, nousb, and/or idebus=50. Some combination of these parameters is often necessary on notebooks

Bruce