Live CD? Text installer? Totally lost with the new install DVD...

[jlittle]

I pulled the hard drive and installed 15.04 on it and ran it perfectly on different hardware. Put the drive back in the laptop and magically didn't work anymore...

If I understand what you did...
In principle, if you install on one machine, you'd have problems booting from that disk on another; some device support gets baked in as part of the install. Sound, video and wireless at least may give trouble, and I imagine processor capabilities might too.

Regards, John Little

[Johnius]

I've done it before successfully. I think I'm going to flash the bios down to the first revision and if that doesn't work, flash it to the inspiron bios.