I recently upgraded my laptop to include an iPod hard drive (as I was really disappointed by the SSD performance). I then went on installing and testing a few Linux eventually settling for Debian. To my suprise, the laptop hung on first reboot. The nice error message was: BUG: soft lockup – CPU#1 stuck for 61s! [kmemstick]. It took me a while to realize what was wrong about this. I removed the integrated SD Card (have a 4GB card in there). And voilà! the laptop now boots without a problem.