Bad news on the laptop, hard drive is dead. Dead dead dead. I was really hoping to test this out, both HD install which apparently can be made to work, as well as wifi which SHOULD work if I it's possible to boot the MD from HD and get wifi going in the OS.
Oddly enough, the laptop (Thinkpad T21/savage video/512MB RAM) is pxe booting, which it never did before. Worked through a bunch of issues, but it appears it may be unusably slow IF I can get it going at all. Xorg is taking 90+ percent of the CPU, I couldn't see the videos in the setup wizard, and as soon as it appears to finally load LMCE (I see the normal screen/menu) X crashes and will not restart. Meh, different topic and I'm guessing the hardware is pretty much ready for the trash.