i also have a toshiba laptop, and can't get past the ioapic error, no matter what distro i try. as far as i know, it's because of the crippled bios by toshiba, that won't let me select ahci mode, so i'm stuck with windows.
if someone has any ideas, please let me know, i really want to get out of the windows hell
i tried the "plug an usb drive when you get the ioapic error", but it did not work.

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CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
RAM: 2 x 1 Gb
2xSATA HDD
ATA DVDRW
MB Asus M2N Nvidia MCP61
Video: GeForce 8600 GT 256 Mb RAM
ADI 1988 onboard audio
Audigy soundcard
Realtek lan