I've got a nice little toshiba m200 which is great for linux, but is impossible too boot since it has no optical drive and I have no optical usb drive

I've allways removed my harddisk and put it into a similar (same chipset and cpu-type) laptop, but this time this was not an option, I used an old computer, made a minimal install onto my harddrive through a usb box for laptop harddrives, inserted the drive into my laptop to complete the installation.

Now it's messed up!

It will not start acpi at startup, if I modprobe acpi i get "could not insert cpufreq-acpi" it will not start powersaved, it does not load the nvidia module automatically, and I can not for the life of me figure out how to fix this.

Is there a way to rescan what hardware suse should configure itself against? should I just give up and do a reinstall through the old solution? How does suse decide which acpi modules to load?

There are probably some hardware-probing scripts that run during the installation. To run the powermanagment, there seem to be some modules required in initrd. Maybe they have not been included during your installation procedure. But you could try this manually with mkinitrd. You could try to modify /etc/sysconfig/kernel and add the modules 'processor' and 'thermal' to the line 'INITRD_MODULES='. There may be others, too (fan, toshiba-acpi, etc.). Then run mkinitrd as root, reboot and see if it works now.