Hanging of Install while initializing swap partition

[jim . rice]

Hi All,

Please pardon if this has been asked before.  I have searched but just not found the answer.

I am trying to install a vanilla instance of potato on an old Gateway Laptop (P150 MMX) and a 2 Gig HD.  The machine had a previous RedHat 5.2 installation.

I boot with a floppy created with the sbm.bin file and then have it boot Debian from the CD-ROM.  I step through the configuration steps and have set up a completely new partition table.

10 M to boot
256 M to swap (only 128 MB RAM)
1903 M to /

I save the partition table and then move to initialize the swap partition.  I tell the install to check for bad blocks and proceed.  Immediately thereafter the screen displays a message "Initializing swap partition . . ." and appears to freeze.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jim