just say 'noscsi', which seems to be needed on many laptops. In fact, I think this should be the default as there is much more people using notebooks than people using scsi devices.

As for other debian(like those boot disk downloaded from debian.org), they are also not notebook friendly(at least newer ones) as they have those RAID device etc. loaded by default. Which also hang on my Dell inspiron.

But both KNOPPIX and debian boots without problem on my 5 years old NEC P100 notebook. Luckily, KNOPPIX gives me the noscsi option which allows me to 'introduce' linux to my inspiron and now I am using linux 80% of the time.

However, I still think IDEPCI(without any other RAID/SCSI driver) should be the default as that is the most common configuration. For those with these high end devices, they should be knowledgeable enough to know what to load.