Hi,
I can hear
the disk drive make a little activity noise first, then
everything's just gone.
I know this effect from the time when I installed SuSE 9.1 on
my dell inspiron. I guess it was related to something like
ACPI. As I didn't find a matching kernel parameter, I
installed another Distro and at least this problem was
gone ;-) .
Maybe building a kernel of your own could be helpful. I'm
really happy with my custom vanilla 2.6.10 with some RT
patches.
Best regards
ce