Thinkpad R40e lock up at installer main menu

[Tim Leslie]

Hi all,

I'm currently trying to install warty on my thinkpad R40e and I'm
running into some problems. Short story: The installer totally locks
up at the first screen of the installer.

Long story: I've downloaded the warty installer iso from the website,
burnt it to cd and successfully used it to install my PC. I've also
ran the built in CD integrity checker which returned no errors, so I'm
confident the CD itself is fine.

I previously had a bastardised knoppix install on the laptop but I
kind of mutilated this so thought I'd go for a complete clean install.

So, I stick the CD in the drive, turn on the laptop, the boot prompt
comes up, I hit enter for the default install. It gets to the lines:

 Starting system log daemon: syslogd, klogd.
 Trying to enable the frame buffer...

And then locks up. After some investigation on a different laptop we
found that the next thing it should have done had to do with usb, so I
reboot and at the prompt run "linux debian-installer/probe/usb=false"
which solved that problem.

With that boot line it makes it to the first screen of the installer
and then completely locks up. The keyboard doesn't respond at all (the
capslock light won't even toggle) and a hard reboot is required.

I've tried any number of combination of boot parameters to solve this
including "expert" instead of "linux", "noapic", "nolapic",  and also
disabling USB from the bios (i need the usb=false either way with this
still) but none of them seem to be of any help.

I had some concerns that some of my hardware might be flaky does to
odd behaviour with the previous install but I've ran all the
diagnostics provided and none of them showed anything up, so I don't
think it's a hardware issue.

I've also successfully run another debian-install based installer (for
our company's in house "distro") and there were no problems with it.
As soon as I can get my hands on the CD's I'll give it a shot with
straight debian and/or knoppix, but at the end of the day I'd like to
have ubuntu on it.

Any ideas or advice you guys could give would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Tim Leslie