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jimmybond
May 12th, 2008, 04:04 PM
First of all, much apologies for a long post, repeated topics in the forum, as I am very much a beginner.

I'm currently running a dual boot desktop with Ubuntu (7.10) and Windows XP Professional on two separate physical hard drives connected in PATA. Several problems:

1. Apparently, I have some hard drive clicking problems (two consecutive clicks every 2-5 seconds when I boot or try to install something) and I've searched around and it seems to be a hard drive "parking" problem that involves APM and can be disabled by using the code

sudo hdparm -B 255 /dev/sdb.
I've tried that using both 255 and 254 in the terminal and I get
setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD failed: Input/output error. Then I wondered if the drive names are correct and did

sudo fdisk -l, which yields:

jimmy@ubuntu-desktop:~$ sudo fdisk -l


Disk /dev/sda: 10.2 GB, 10262568960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1247 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x29af29ae

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1246 10008463+ 7 HPFS/NTFS


Disk /dev/sdb: 4311 MB, 4311982080 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 524 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x47d047cf

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 494 3968023+ 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 495 524 240975 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 495 524 240943+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Maybe it's some other problem.

2. I've also read that some of these issues can be resolved by upgrading. Should I upgrade to 8.04? It seems that the wireless network (Intel 2915ABG) is working, but I have no idea how to upgrade the default drivers for the device. As for upgrading Ubuntu, I can try using the System > Administration > Update Manager but that does not open and gives me the same clicking noises as described before.

3. This was a previous problem that doesn't really seem to have a solution, but the configuration I have now is annoying, but doable. I need to enable and disable the individual hard drives in Dell's BIOS each time I want to boot into Ubuntu, as there are no options to dual boot. The grub menu only appears after I disable the Windows XP drive in BIOS, (so obviously when I select Windows XP from grub, it will not boot). I think this a BIOS problem and I think it is the most recent version, so I don't mind if there's no solution.

If you took all the time to read all of this, thanks! Any ideas/suggestions/solutions will be greatly appreciated! heh.