install on vaio r600 from cd, can't get to the partition bit

[pixelbeast]

hi,
I have a laptop (sony vaio R600HFPD) which has problems getting through the first stages of the install.
All the messages go passed so quickly, but it does say the following... "no block devices found" and "no volume groups found"
It then asks me to specifiy a "root device", to which all my efforts are replied with "not a valid root device"
I am aware of other people on the net having problems booting linux from the cd-rom drive on this and similar laptops, where the topics of firewire and acpi appear in people's blogs. But as far as I can gather I shouldn't have any problems with either since I have tried putting "acpi=on" on the boot command line, and I think the problems with firewire are pre kernel 2.6 ?? (not my area of expertise though )
Have I done anthing really stupid? I am trying to install to an empty partition, with another two partitions been taken by WinXP, I don't have to sub-partition this until I get to the appripriate bit in the install do I?
Thanks for any advice,
pixel

[pilla]

When everything goes wrong, there is the alternative install guide.
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