Whilst debian installeer detected the ICH6 disk controller as a generic EIDE controller, tuning the kernel for handling ICH6 as a serial-ATA controller almost boosted ten times the disk performances.
More details here.
This document, mostly written in November 2005, intends to describe the installation of Debian Sarge onto a Toshiba M40X-317 laptop.
I focused on details that were tricky or unusual ; this document isn't a step by step installation guide for beginners, rather it should help people having matching hardware to tune their debian (or most linux) setup.