Hello, me too I'm stuck at "tc@box:~$", but the above didn't help me. When I said "startx", I was told: "-sh: startx: not found". When I said: "sudo fromISOfile /mnt/hda1", I learned: "Invalid device specified: hda1". Accordingly "sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt" failed: "No such device or address". The command "fdisk -l" just refused to give me any answer. I suppose experts will already recognize the error state I'm in, but I want to give a few more details.
I'm trying to revive a 20-year-old IBM Thinkpad 310E with 64 MB RAM which has no CD-ROM drive. It can only boot from floppy and hard disk (1.5 GB). FreeDos gives the following message on boot: "BAD controller at I-O address F000h, chip I.D. 10B95219h. EDD BIOS data ERROR, Disk 80h." However, I don't think that this causes too many problems, because I managed to install Windows 98 (I had to transfer the content of the CD via laplink cable), and also Basic Linux 3.5 runs fine, starting X with JWM desktop and giving me access to hda1. The machine has a PCMCIA slot with a USB card, but it cannot boot from a USB drive, because the BIOS doesn't know about it.
With the help of Windows 98 I could copy CorePlus-6.4.1.iso from USB memory stick to FAT16 partition hda1. I installed GRUB4DOS and edited menu.lst accordingly to boot from this ISO file. I also tried a frugal installation on the same partition and then on an EXT3 partition that I created using "Partition Magic", but results are the same: The Tiny Core Linux system only boots up to the command prompt, not to the desktop as promised, and then refuses to follow my commands. Surely I'm doing something very wrong?