Thanks for all the information...

>   If you add the "ATA passthru" patch (from Jeff Garzik) to your kernel, then
>   hdparm can work with those drives."
Does this mean I have to recompile the kernel with the patch? That is a
little beyond my level of expertise currently... hope it will be
incorporated into a newer kernel release soon.

I was having a lot of problems and thus reinstalled SL 4.0. That's when I
realised it had not done some of the post-install config on my first try
(I'd got some error about the install image file). Now it's much better.
Dislpay is not corrupted, runlevel 5 gives graphical boot screen... all
which didnt happen before.

Except now my wireless card doesnt work. This is a problem I will try to fix
(I've tried RPMS from ATRPMS, and source files from sourceforge for ipw2200,
put the firmware in the proper place, loaded the ieee crypto modules, made
sure the driver and firmware versions match, but the module cant load the
firmware at startup due to some reason).

I used to keep checking what the module did at boot up using dmesg... The
main problem now is that suddenly my dmesg doesnt give even a line of
output... just nothing... caused some panic for me...
that's kind of hard to google... what do I check?

Thanks,
--Vaibhav