[svlug] My laptop just died

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Larry Colen (lrc at red4est.com):

> As an aside, I was albe to boot the system off of kubuntu, but it
> won't access the HD. 

[I assume you mean the Lenovo T61.]

That would be because of the ICH8M-class southbridge, with a boot kernel
having insufficiently recent support for ahci-driver-supporting
hardware.  If you're bound and determined to use that boot CD, you
_could_ go into the BIOS Setup and see if there's a setting to put the
SATA chip into "compatibility" (or "legacy", whatever) mode, so that it
looks to the software like an Intel ICH5, and thus allows you to use the
older ata_piix driver.

You'd probably still have a non-functional e1000 ethernet driver for the
same reason.  Long-term fix would be to use a more recent distro build
with a newer boot kernel (and thus set of drivers, PCI ID table, etc.).
 
> It also only uses 1024x768 of the 1400x1050 display.

Usually fixable _even_ on lagging distro releases,  Necessary clues will
be in your /var/log/Xorg.[whatever] file.