Suse On A Hp Laptop Problems

Hi.
Newbie here, just hope someone can help me.

I have been trying for the last few days to load SuSe 10 onto a HP Compaq 6910p laptop.
It has a Sata drive with Windows XP and I wish to dual-boot.

What a nightmare, first the dvd/cd drive wasn't recognised, then it found no hard drives.
Eventually I disabled the Data execution mode and SATA native mode in the BIOS.

I have looked extensively on the net and eventually got the DVD to fully install.

Last time I tried boot option - 'all-generic-ide'
then loaded the following modules:
ide-generic
ahci
ide-scsi
sata_sil
sata_sis
didn't know any options to use for the above though....

Took a New installation, accepted the (rather large, I thought) Suse partition and the thing took 50 mins to complete.

However on reboot, after loading reiserfs it is waiting for /dev/hda6 to appear.
However the boot fails and appears that /dev/hda6 is the touchpad !

Loading reiserfs
Waiting for device /dev/hda6 to appear: Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 6.2, id: 0x2580b1, caps: 0xa04793/0x00000
serio: Synaptics pass-through port at isa0060/serio4/input0
input: SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad on isa0060/serio4
.....input: PS/2 Generic Mouse on Synaptics-pt/serio0
........not found -- exiting to /bin/sh
$

and I am stuck !!

I think I shall have to reinstall again but I am not sure exactly which boot options and modules to load to get it to find my hard drive correctly.

Any advice would be most grateful.

hmm, don't think you will see much with this, SuSE 10 is no longer supported & if i remember correctly, SuSE 10 had nasty problems with SATA drives. why not try a more recent version ? say, 10.3 ?

Andy