I just installed Slackware 11 onto my friends laptop for him. I gave him a choice of Slackware, SLED10 or Ubuntu Feisty but he wanted Slack because he likes everything he's seen on my HP laptop. I gave him fair warning about hardware detection compared to the other choices and the learning curve so he's ok with that. Now:

Had I known the Toshiba has an sata hard drive I could've saved some time(I used Ubuntu to format it before I found out). The 2.6.17.13 from disc2 panics with a message about "cannot mount root fs...provide a valid root=". I got it booting with the 2.4.33.3 sata.i kernel from disc1. I had to disable hotplug because it would hang there during startup. So now it boots but it has no drivers loaded for network, usb, etc. I'm prepared to compile a 2.6.21.2 specifically for it but it'll be a week before I see it again.

My question is what could be causing hotplug to hang? Do Toshiba laptops require some parameters at the LILO prompt? Is there anything Toshiba-specific I need to do to it when I see it again? I feel bad that he's going to have it for a week without usb, sound or internet access.

on laptops I install huge26.s for starters, then I compile my own. I've found that most 'setup' programs detect better with huge26.s and it detects SATA drives better too.

I forgot to mention I did try huge26.s with the same error of "cannot mount root fs..." That was the first kernel I tried because I expected it to work for the same reason you gave. When I rebooted from the install disc I noticed the only kernel modules installed were for 2.4.33.3 so I thought that was why huge26 failed and switched to bareacpi.i and finally sata.i.

Note: This is actually the first time I've done a Slackware install since the days of 9.1 so huge26 and anything involving sata are new to me. Slackware is so stable and easy to fix I just haven't had to reinstall in 4 years.