Laptops :: dsl 2.1 & Dell Latitude CPt

I can boot the Dell Latitude CPt via CD, but am limited to what I can do. I cannot eject the CD and replace it with another. I cannot run cfdisk at all, and fdisk returns an error that it cannot access /dev/hda. However, a view of the system stats clearly show /dev/hda1 /dev/hda2 /dev/hda3 and the CD- all mountable. (The drive is formatted and installed with Windows NT 4.0.)

Any ideas on how to get around this and repartition the disk for Linux and a frugal/grub install?

Does it work if you type:

sudo su
cfdisk /dev/hda

That failed, too, yesterday. However, I now have good news. In the setup screens for this box there is something called the boot speed. It was set at the default - 500mhz - so I thought, "OK". But it wasn't OK. Once I set it "a slower speed" (unspecified) for "older OS's" things started working. Then it booted up quickly and worked fine. I reformatted the disk and install a frugal/grub install with no problem.

original here.