I own a laptop whose harddisk just went nuts unfortunately, i'll have to replace it next week. I've had just installed debian on it (with luck since the harddisk was giving me read/write error). The system could not shutdown by itself, i.e. I have to manually turn off the laptop since after a "shutdown -h now" i receive this message "irq timeout on hda" and then i get a "Power Off" message....

I'm really curious whether this has to do with the mad harddisk or with the fact that debian is non-compatible with the laptop since i want to put debian again on a new harddisk, and i don't want to waste time if all this means an in-compatible issue!!

thanks, ganninu

Have you tried doing a "low level format" on the HDD (I put it in quotes because this days you don't normally do a real low level format).

Get the HDD vendor's software to do a HDD initialization. Most of them, besides writing all zeros to the HDD, also check for trouble sectors.