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.
