HD Install :: DSL on a Pentium laptop

some thoughts:
- use the DSL kernel+minirt
- check your grub menu.lst configuration
- could try loadlin on your current hd partition
- try other bootloaders/managers, like sbm

From memory, having used OnTrack in the distant past......

My understanding was that OnTrack loaded up code that trapped interrupt calls to the BIOS & thus effectively replaced the BIOS code with some that it placed in RAM. OnTrack was originally to get around the disk size restrictions of early BIOSes & DOS (& hence early versions of M$ Windoze). From your experience it looks as though it must probe the disk type as well (thinking about it, it must have to do this in order to be able to deal with BIOS interrupts, read/writes to the drive(s)).

You may be able to use OnTrack, boot to DOS & then use LoadLIN to load up DSL. I have seen this method reported as working when DOS TSR programs are needed, but I have not had any success myself (loading a DOS TSR to handle the screen framebuffer on an IBM 755C laptop, e.g. http://www.adamcon.org/~dmwick/thinkpad/ or http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO-5.html)

Good Luck!

original here.