For what its worth:
I don't know anything about a 560 but I just went through this on two 380XDs.
Loaded Mandrake 8.1 and even though I've had good luck with earlier versions,
8.1 ran like a ruptured turtle!.
It probably loaded and started some service that had a problem.

I did not stop to figure out why, but loaded Redhat 7.2 over it.
RH runs great!! and it was a real nobrainer to install.
Billy and Steve should really be worried about this.

BTW, the bios limit on these machines is 8.2 G and I have no trouble seeing and
using a 12G HD.
Triple booting to W98, W2K and RH.

BTW2 If you have a CD rom drive, both distros will boot from it.
Installing from 10 floppies is painfull.
Cheers, Bert

Jeddy Lin wrote:

Hello again, For those of you running Linux on a 560-series machine (or any other Thinkpad with no factory cd-rom for that matter)... Can we have an informal survey on the way you loaded your particular flavor of Linux? (I'm *this* close to going out and buying floppies so I can load Debian completely off the 10 floppies or so that it takes...)Thanks. =) - Jeddy