acer laptop, install freezing

[Daniel Taylor]

Hello,

i just bought a new acer laptop (travelmate 2200) and was hoping to put 
ubuntu on to it, but it freezes when installing, when the 'chose 
language' menu (first curses install menu) comes up it won't respond, no 
keys work, not even caps lock etc.

I should probably mention that this laptop has something weird going on 
where it needs a small partition (fist partition on the table) that it 
writes to for recovery purposes (from what i gather from the manual) so 
ubuntu would have to be installed to /dev/hda2 (i don't think that makes 
any difference but it's worth mentioning.)

the live cd won't work either, i get the following errors:

Warning: unable ti find base module!
cat: /MorphixCD/etc/ld.so.cache: No sure file or directory

Setting paths.../linuxrc: 543: /bin/cp: not found
/linuxrc: 543: test: not found
/linuxrc: 543: rm: not found
/linuxrc: 543: awk: not found
[...]
/linuxrc: 543: echo: not found
/linuxrc: 543: mkdir: not found
/linuxrc: 543: cannot create /var/run/utmp: Directory nonexistent
VRS: Cannot open root device "<NULL>" or unknown-block(9,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(9,0)

Spec of laptop available here:
http://www.comet.co.uk/comet/html/cache/320_228214.html

I currently have slackware running on it, that install went fine.

I don't think it's the cd, i have tried 3 different ones (the ones i 
ordered from 'shipit')

thanks for any help you can give,

Daniel,