HD Install :: Stuck in newbie hell

I've read pages of msgs, pages of how to's, but none seems to
apply to my problem. I'm trying to install to an old laptop (P-150,
16m ram, 1.5 gig HD) with a cd-rom drive that can be swapped with a floppy drive, ( can't have both at once). I can boot from the live CD, but no matter what variable I put in (lowram etc) it hangs at "Bad EIP value- Kernel panic: attempted to kill init!"
More info, the drive has been wiped clean, fdisk into 3 parts, but I did this with a dos based utill. so they are FAT32, FAT32, FAT16.
I have the Toms disk, but haven't been able to figure out how to use cfdisk.
BTW, my ultimate goal is to use this thing for a digital picture frame.

Check these forums... I believe there are a couple threads about that that could help you out.

A search for "Bad EIP value" on http://www.google.com/linux brings up some useful info in the first few results.

original here.