Fixed, sort of
Turns out I had a bad drive after all. But even after replacing it, it still didn't work. I found the two places that were recommending Lilo to fix it:
http://ubuntuforums....7&t=282913&page=2
http://ubuntuforums....php/t-353550.html
I also found recommendations to add "noapic" and "acpi=off" to the end of my "kernel" line in menu.lst. The acpi switch seems to have fixed it. It should matter, but everything I care about seems to be working.
Seems this laptop is really light on reliability. The combo drive seems to fail, and the video cable is flaky. That seems to explain the ghosting I mentioned in another thread. But hey, what did I expect for < $400 new?
