RedHat install and Toshiba Satellite strangeness

[George Fischer <george fischer attbi com>]

For the past 4 days, I've been attempting to dual boot a toshiba 
satellite 2435-S255.

I've used system commander 7 to partition the disk and I'm satisfied 
that all the disk partitions are correct and bootable, active and 
non-hidden as appropriate. My first sign of trouble came about with 
system commander hanging  when it analysed the system. The work around 
was to boot SC7 from the CDROM. This was a bit strange, but I could live 
with that.

In attempting to install linux, a RH7.2 boot starts out fine. The system 
reads the CDROM. It displays . . .

   Uncompressing Linux. . .  Ok, booting the kernel.

at which point it hangs. The same behavior happens with RH8.0. If I 
connect a USB floppy drive and attempt to boot from floppy, I get a 
similar result.

I cycled through all reasonable BIOS settings but still get the same 
result. Toshiba support is unaware of any BIOS problems and seems 
uninterested as long as the XP recovery disk works.

Is anyone aware of either BIOS (phoenix V1.20), hardware, or driver 
issues on this particular model laptop?

Thanks

George