Thinkpad 755C Suse install

[david at kramer.ne.mediaone.net (David Kramer)]

I have a 755C with a (now) 1.4GB hard drive and (now) 32MB+4MB=38MB RAM,
docking station 1, and an  Accton PCMCIA ethernet card for it.  It
currently has Win95 on hda1 and Red Hat 5.2 on hda2 (/), hda3 (/usr),
and hda4 (swap).  I did this install via ftp from a linux box on my
intranet (put the CD in the server and mounted it under ~ftp), and that
took a long time to figure out.  I want to replace Red Hat with Suse.

When I try to install Suse from the CDROM in the docking station, it
does not recognize the SCSI card (I think its a Future Domain 850). 
That also prevents me from hooking up an external drive to install from,
or an external SCSI CDROm drive.

When I try to install via FTP like I did Red Hat, it says I can't find
the server.  I'm pretty sure it is recognizing the PCMCIA ethernet
card.  If I let it load modules itself it loads "ne".  I wish it would
give more information than that.  I also wish their install had a
command prompt on another console like Red Hat's so I can dignose the
problem. 

When I copied the contents of CD1 to a directory on hda2 and CD2 (do I
need this for the install?) to a directory on hda3 (and ln -s to a
directory on hda2 (had to do this for space reasons), it eventually
fails, telling me it couldn't mount hda2 cuz it was already mounted. 
Duh.

I would like to fool around with the FTP option a little more to see if
I'm doing something wrong.  Will it ask me where on the FTP server the
files are, or do I need to make it look a specific way?

I would rather not wipe out my Win95 partition and dum CD1 there, cuz
there are some special hardware configurations I would not look forward
to reconstructing.

Any advice?  Had anyone got linux to recognize the docking station 1?

BTW, if anyone else tries this, on the boot prompt you need to specify
"floppy=thinkpad".

Thanks in advance.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                    david at kramer.ne.mediaone.net
DK KD                                  http://start.at/david.kramer
DKK D  
DK KD  It is appallingly obvious that our technology 
DDDD   exceeds our humanity.                        Albert Einstein
-
Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with
"subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the
message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).