I have installed slack9 on a Compaq 2548EA laptop. I have lilo configured and working properly.

When I try to boot in linux the boot goes well until it looks at the driver for the usb 2.0 ports on my laptop. The line that it is stuck on is

hcd.c: echi-hcd @ 00.0b.2, VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0

If anyone has any advice on how to get around this problem it'd be appreciated.

Thanks.

It looks like the USB ports on your laptop don't play nice with Linux. You may need to get a boot disk (Usually the install media will do for this, they should have a rescue mode) with USB support turned off, then boot off of that to get into your system. If this works, then you'll need to compile yourself a new kernel which contains the drivers you need. Even though the ECHI USB2 driver crashes, the OCHI or UCHI (depends on your hardware) may still work to give you USB1.1 support, however you will probably want to compile these as modules so that you can load them and test to see if they will crash the computer.