Laptops :: Thinkpad i series hang?

I have a thinkpad i series that hangs at the Grub menu. The laptop has a bad pcmcia socket and bad bios cell. It runs perfectly fine on the live boot DSL disk. Except it had XP on it and took about 2.5 to 3 minutes to boot. XP kicked the drive horribly! On DSL it took about a minute to boot from the CDROM and purred. I partitioned it with Partition Magic. Chkdsk and cfdisk say its fine. Its partitioned about ext2 2 GB, swap 130 MB, ext2 3 GB. Nothing works at the menu hang but ctrl-alt-del. I installed DSL onto the hda6 secondary ext2 partition and boot from the CDROM with the run off the HD option and it ran fine. I am stuck. If it locks at the menu what can I do?

There may be some grub workarounds... do you have any errors?

You could also try lilo or some other bootloader.
Or you could stick with booting off your cd (see from* cheatcodes)

Thank you for the reply. No errors. I tried lilo and no go on the install of it. I was able to after reinstalling DSL several times different ways to get it to boot into the hda1 partition by booting first with the cdrom. Waited for Tux to appear and then pulled the disk. Seems to me it should work off the hard drive. If it gets as far as the grub menu what could hang it?

Grub didn't install properly, try installing it yourself from the livecd..

original here.