The bare minimum: 4Meg laptop

Dear Tom,

I am fihting with a problem, maybe you will ask ?why?

I got a ten years old laptop. and ofcourse the first thing I did was putting Tomsrtbt on it.

I was luckey! 
I used V1.7.140. There was a prompt

UH-OH! No RAM for /usr. Runlevel 4!
(None):login:
                    Press any key accept Enter and you see:
                                        Warning using echo for ls
I used ls, mount, fdisk, mkswap, swapon, dd, cpio.

the 84Mb disk has f4 partitions:
/usr runs on /dev/hda6
swap on /dev/hda7
/dev/hda1 and /dev/hda5 are msdos

Why??
I used it and learned more from the basics of Linux. And it is a good demonstation tool to explain the basics of Linux.

Then I tried V1.7.361 and V2.0.203.
The 361 version did not stop after the login prompt, but tried to load /usr and died.
The 203 version had other problems, I thing with the bzip2 unpacking.

I analysed the the 140 and 361 .The difference is the login via login.s and the login.lua. I tried to edit the /etc/rc.S deleting the second init 5, changing it to init 4.

Has anyone a solution for my problem? Is it possible to login with a rebuilt of the 1.7.361 disk or what to do with the V2.0.203.
I am mostly interested in 4k RAM part!

--Piet