I'm trying out Zenwalk on a Thinkpad 600E, with a 300 MHz processor and 192 MB of RAM. FWIW a few other distros work on this thing - slowly, mind, but they're usable with the right settings.

Anyway, if I try to boot the install CD, it fails to load the initial ramdisk, complaining of a write error.

I've managed to work around this by specifying the ramdisk size, with the kernel parameter ramdisk_size=X. An X that prevents the write error turns out to be 65536 or so. However, the installer still panics - it says that it can't mount the initial ramdisk using any filesystem driver. At this point I'm kind of stuck.

I checked the ISO's md5sum before burning the CD... And I was able to boot the CD fine on another computer. So the problem is unique to the Thinkpad.

What might be wrong?

Edit: solved. It was a BIOS bug, and updating to the latest 600E BIOS fixed it.