[svlug] My laptop just died

[Larry Colen]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 05:53:22PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
# 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.]

No, I meant my recently deceased Vaio. Sorry about the confusion.

# 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.

Heather's right, you do make a pretty damned good auto-faq.

I've heard enough bad things about the new T61s, I'm going to go check
out the 41 presently. It's cheap enough I can justify it as a rush
purchase. In a few months, I'll either sell it and get something
closer to what I was looking for, or keep it around as an oversized
iPod.



-- 
       Too much of a good thing, is better than too much of a bad thing.
Larry Colen             lrc at red4est.com            http://www.red4est.com/lrc