Laptops :: Dell latitude D610 abort while booting

Booting Dell Latitude D610 w/DSL 3.2 fails.

After selecting "failsafe" at the boot prompt I get the following...

PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfb5be, last bus=4
PCI: Using configuration type 1
Schuled_task(): keventd has not started
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000000
Printing eip:
00000000
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<00000000>] Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010282
eax: 00000006 ebx: df7bb400 ecx: 00000000 edx: 00000000
esi: df7bb400 edi: df7c6c00 epb: 00000002 esp: df7abe68
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Process swapper (pid: 1, stackpage=df7ab000)
Stack: df7b8900 df7c63e0 df7bb400 00000000 c01823c1 df7bb400 df7bb400 df7bb5e8
00000000 e000c433 c018ffe4 df7bb400 df7bb400 c15f8400 df7cdd30 00000000
00000000 df7c6b80 df7c6c00 c019037a df7bb400 00000000 c15f8c00 c15f5310
Call Trace: [<c01823c1>] [<c018ffe4>] [<c019037a>] [<c0190cbe>] [<c018d2b9>]
[<c018d23e>][<c018d0eb>] [<c018d501>] [<c018e5fc>] [<c018d3a2>] [<c018d488>]
[<c019754f>][<c01050ad>] [<c0107114>]

Code: Bad EIP value
<0> Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!

Without "failsafe" I see:
loading linux24 .................
loading mrinit24.................
>>>screen goes dark. No further activity on CD.

The same CD-RW works on other platforms.

Using CD-RW as boot CD is iffy at best.

If your issue is dark screen, then try various vga options or even the fbWWWxHHH boot images, e.g.

boot: fb800x600

or

boot: dsl vga=normal

or

press F3 at boot prompt and try vga=xxx from values displayed on the table

Trying different vga settings didn't help.
SysLinux also aborts with same error.
DSL-N boots OK.

original here.