DELL 2500 - freeze! v early in boot-latest kernel 'iomem', 'prefetch'

Question

Hi everyone....! Well, a problem is an opportunity right!!? :--)
Here's the short version:
All fine on the old Dell Inspiron 2500, 1 ghz PIII intel basically UNTIL an -Syu a couple of weeks ago.
It was time to wipe the old test laptop anyways so now I've become certain that the problem is:
something about the new 2.6.28 kernel ... narrowed it down by doing an 06.08 cd base install no problems.
update JUST the kernel and what it HAd to have to do so and it freezes after about 2 seconds of the boot sequence.
Can only give partial unless someone can tell me IF there WOULD be alog file if I do a recovery boot and find it.
Normal boot gives stuff like this: 
system 00:01: iomem range 0xff8000000-0xfffffff counld not be reserved
and the last line of the freeze is PREFETCH window: 0x00000030000000-0x00000037ffffff
Stuff like that... sorry i've not more though I'm typing it out.
SO:
Tried it by doing the grub thing:  acpi=off
The boot gets a LOT further... though after loading udev it says:
Code: Bad EIP value.
EIP: (and a bunch of number code)
[end trace 4661116e59009c2a ]---
note: fsck.ext2[906] exited with preempt_count 1
Warning... fsch.ext2 for device /dev/sda1 exited with signal 11
THEN there's a [fail] and then the stock FILESSYSTEM CHECK FAILED info and the option to give root password or Control-D to continue.
So I do an fsck and get the same info as above bad EIP etc. plus the stuff that was above the BAD EIP that I didn't mention earlier which is about 12 lines of weird code... weird to me that is... hehehe
Any ideas?
Figuring the new kernel doesn't like old laptops...
thanks for reading!

Answer 1

I've just again tried to install on the old laptop with the 2.6.28 version of the kernel (I think 2.6.27 was a problem as well)
Anyways... above I mention learing how to downgrade a couple of package....madwifi and kernel 2.6 which worked... And I think learned to ignor them with pacman so I could upgrade everything other than those two.
So... I've just tried to install the latest 2009.02 cd img hoping that the recent kernel release may have solved the kernel panic iomem and prefetch and EID and ton of other issues that rendered te laptop usless as it would not boot...
Anyhow..
I found this and by adding it to the boot string and than agter booting writing it nito the menu.lst it works great!  You probably know about hitting 'e' at the first arch boot window, slecting the first line and then hitting 'e' again.... scrolling over if need be and adding this to the line... hit return then 'b' for boot... then after it boots or installs do the menu.lst mod to write the line in permanently...
Anyways this has totally for the time solved my BIG problems...
pci=noacpi nobiospnp noapic nolapic
Here's some good stuff to go with it.
http://grumpymole.blogspot.com/2007/05/ … eters.html