[ltp] Installing SuSE 8.2 on TP 240

[Ted Wiseman]

I'm still looking for help to resolve a problem installing SuSE 8.2 on a 
Thinkpad 240 (300MHz Celeron / 192MB RAM) using a PCMCIA CDROM 
(Panasonic KXL-D740).

I recently replaced the 240's original hard drive with a new 20GB drive. 
On the 240's original hard drive I installed Suse 7.2 using the above 
PCMCIA CD drive. CD drive was recognized, install was successful.

I bought SuSE 8.2 to install on the new drive. Since 8.2 is not packaged 
with floppy disks, I created boot and module floppies from the 8.2 CD 
per SuSE's instructions. During install, I can get as far as enabling 
PCMCIA chip support after inserting modules floppies 1 and 4, but then 
the 8.2 install process halts with an error message that it can't find 
the SuSE CD.

Under System Information / Harddisks CDRom (on the install menu) the 
CDROM drive appears to be correctly identified as follows:

     SCSI:      CDROM: MATSHITAKME CD-ROM02  Rev 1.05
                Host:  scsi0  channel:00  Id:05  lun:00

but for some reason it's not being activated.


SuSE's installation support does not cover PCMCIA issues, but they 
suggested the problem may be related to ACPI, and emailed me a support 
article on modifying kernel parameters for ACPI on installation.
http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/81_acpi.html

On succesive installation attempts I've tried each of the kernel 
parameters the article mentions (acpi=off; acpi=oldboot; acpi=force; 
pci=noacpi) but none of those options result in the PCMCIA CDROM drive 
being activated for installation.

If anyone has experience dealing with this or a similar problem 
installing on a Thinkpad w/o internal CD drive, I'd appreciate any ideas 
or help. Having installed version 7.2 with this same CD drive and 
laptop, I'm hoping there's a way to make it work with version 8.2

Thanks.