IBM 600E laptop installation

[Justin C. Sherrill]

I recently acquired a IBM 600E laptop; I tried installing DragonFly 1.2.5
(latest image from Chlamidiya) on it.  No luck - right after "Loading up
/boot/loader... found", it shows a couple columns of text (crash output?)
for a fraction of a second, and reboots.

The DragonFly CD works in other machines; a Ubuntu Linux live CD works in
this 600E.  So, from this inexhaustive deduction, it seems the DragonFly
boot loader is hitting something it really doesn't like.  Any suggestions?
 I don't have the connector handy to pull out the laptop drive and install
using it in another PC, which would be my next step.