Linux on Dell laptop?

[Adam Myrow]

Does your Dell Laptop have Serial ATA hard drives by any chance?  If it 
does, you could be in for trouble.  My brand new Dell Dimension 8300 
desktop has a serial ATA hard drive, and the only way I got Linux working 
on it was to build a 2.6.7 kernel on my old computer with support for 
Serial ATA and use that to boot with.  BTW, at least for the chipset I 
have, Serial ATA is treated like SCSI, so my hard drive ended up being 
seen as /dev/sda.  Once I got the kernel finally working, things were 
fine.