Rafe, this may not be the answer, but I'd try it anyway. Got into the CMOS of the 'puter and make the FIRST bootable device the DVD, if you can. Since it's a USB, you may have to disable the floppy to force the 'puter to see the DVD first.
Fred
No on this machine, IBM Thinkpad Transnote, one can never boot from the cdrom. Only the usb floppy - wierd I know. Thanks to everyone who gave this problem any thought at all. The solution is . . . ftp the SUSE 9.1 boot and module disks Boot from said disks only have the suse 9.3 cd in the cdrom drive. It is going a little slow, but it is installing away as I write. I tried the bootdisk from 9.3 on three other computers and they don't seem to work on anything. If all my hardware is that picky then something is still wrong. I used linux back when slackware was the only game in town. I also used SUSE a lot back around 6.5, but switched away because of work. Must admit I almost gave up on this and went with debian. Not that there is anything wrong with either, I just wanted to give SUSE a try again and I am glad to say it looks like I am going to get my chance. My Mandrake 9.2 box will become a debian box in a couple months. First I have to figure out how to replace caps on the mother board - it is always something. Rafe