Problem installing Ubuntu on an ancient laptop

[Jonathan Doda]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I've been trying to install Ubuntu on an old Compaq Armada 4160T which
was previously running Slack 10 with no problems.  It has a Pentium
w/MMX 166 Mhz, 48 MB of RAM, and a 2 GB hard drive.  I'm using the
"custom" install, and everything proceeds normally (albeit in low-memory
mode) until just after the new partitions have been written to disk, at
which point I get a screen with the error message:

"The attempt to mount a file system with type ext3 in IDE1 master,
partition #1 (hda1) at / failed."

It also asks me if I wish to resume paritioning, but no matter how I
partition the disk, or what file system I use, I get the same error
(except replace "ext3" in the above message with whichever filesystem
I'm trying).

So, does anybody have any idea what's going on, and how I can work
around it?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFB6rUqWEgeeLQ8a74RAiLWAJ9vkNwyIFfa05ZAM3GvsT64QMgw+wCcDkfZ
4IWUbytvUc6OiGNGy1hO52E=
=Yfua
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----