System freeze at boot

Hello,
I have a problem with booting tomsrtbt on a Gericom 5100c laptop with a 
Celeron 433 and 64MB RAM. It says "bzip2 Uncompressing Linux... aaa" and 
then hangs there forever. I've tried both the floppy and the CD version, 
with the same results. The floppy drive doesn't seem to have problems 
with 1722kb floppies as it can boot into muLinux without any problems. 
The tomsrtbt floppy was written on that laptop, and both the floppy and 
the CD boot fine in other computers. Another strange thing I observed is 
that loading the kernel image from the CD takes longer than loading it 
from the floppy, although the CDROM drive is IIRC 24x and at least it 
isn't that slow when used with a dos boot floppy.
I've searched the archive and found a reference that this problem is 
caused by too little RAM. Has anyone seen that problem on a (comparably) 
fast machine like I am using? Or can you point me at some other small 
linux distro (1 or 2 floppies or a not too big CD image)? It needs to be 
capable of converting an existing ext2 partition to ext3 (using tune2fs).
Thanks in advance,
-- 
Oliver