USB booting :: DSL hangs on boot after CPU detection



I have an old laptop sitting around that I decided to play around with.  It is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 470CDT.  I am using a floppy USB boot disk, and the DSL image on a 128 meg attache drive.  The computer boots fine off the floppy, it loads the drivers for the usb, and finds the image just fine.  It creates the /ramdisk and it's directories and symlinks.  It says "Starting init process." "INIT: version 2.78-knoppix booting" "Running Linux Kernel 2.4.26." "Processor 0 is Mobile Pentium MMX 199MHz" then it hangs. No activity on the floppy or USB drives and I've let it sit there like that for over 3 hours with no change.  I've tried playing with some of the boot options such as: vga=normal, dma, failsafe, expert, different color/resolution combos, minimal, lowram, and install.  The farthest it gets with any of the options is to the processor detection.  Any ideas on how to get it to boot?
How about

lowram mem=32M

Where the "32M" is the amount of RAM installed in your laptop.  Make sure that the "mem" is lowercase and the "M" at the end is uppercase

In The BIOS, Use PgUp/PgDn to switch between the two pages.
Set (and note) the parameters for the various devices, in particular, the sound card.
On page 2, under PC CARD, set Controller Mode=PCIC Compatible, or the PCMCIA ethernet card won't work.

Did you install USB HDD or USB ZIP?
Sorry it's floppy!
I was wondering about my own Toshiba. b/c i can't even get it to read the usb pen drive at startup.

Next Page...
original here.