Ubuntu May Be Killing Your Laptop's Hard Drive

wwrmn writes "There's a debate going on over at bugs.launchpad.net on whether it's the Ubuntu, BIOS, hard-drive manufacturer, or pick-any-player's fault, but Ubuntu (and perhaps any OS) may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature / acpi bug / OS configuration. Regardless of where the fault lies or how it's fixed, you might want to take some actions now to try to prevent the damage."

Comments

May be FUD, but it happened to me

[Tim_sama]

I installed Ubuntu about 2 weeks ago, and somehow the installation screwed up my hard drive completely. I even tried a low-level format; nothing worked. At the time, I figured it was GRUB that had done it, but according to this news, it was Ubuntu. Which is really sad, because I was planning to finally complete that jump to Linux. Oh well, once this problem is resolved somehow, maybe I'll give it another shot.

i hate to say this but:

[blhack]

Just buy the warranty for it.
Honestly, I was just on the phone with HP about it last night, the warranty for my laptop is about 200 bucks....this covers EVERYTHING (including, the very very cute sounding persian girl from canada told me, dropping it into a tank of water while its still running).

I know that slashdot is home to some hard-core hardware nerds, and some very legit engineers, but Come on guys, how many of us can replace a video card that is soldered onto the motherboard.

This will be the 2nd time that i have had to use the warranty for my laptop (meaning i'm batting 2 for 2 right now).

If you're like me, and actually USE your laptop for its intended purpose (meaning having it thrown in the back of a car for countless trips for coffee) for god's sake

BUY THE STINKING WARRANTY FOR IT!

Slashdot comment browsing is unusable

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this is offtopic, but who was the idiot who decided to make browsing comments on slashdot unusable?

I don't think I have the patience anymore to click "25 More" 934850293485 times just to be able to view comments.

Slashdot has finally, officially, jumped the shark.

in a somewhat related note.

[Anonymous Coward]

the following is a true and slightly ontopic plaintext vicarious reenactment of an experience i encountered many moons ago. if you have something even vaguely similar i would love to hear about it, as this is the only case ive ever personally experienced (or heard of) and was a first hand witness to software destroying hardware in all my days.

at a small computer shop i once worked at, a woman brought in a packard bell 486 dx2 66 (iirc.)

back then we were ordering tons of those 'pcchips' all in one motherboards (this is back when all in one motherboards werent very common. onboard video was only barely starting to look like it would be commonplace, but onboard sound/modem/ethernet/etc were almost exclusively on these particular cheap boards).

so we yoink the old packard motherboard out and throw this one in, boot up install drivers everything went smooth and i considered it done. we had these annoying checklists i almost never did but for some reason this time i did, one of the last steps was checking the floppy drive. the floppy didnt work, so i changed physical drives and it still didnt work, changed cables etc. after awhile of testing i decided that the onboard floppy port on the board was defective from factory and we grabbed another allinone board off the stack, and this time, the first thing i did before anything was boot off a floppy and it worked fine.

reset the comp, let it boot into windows, and once again, the floppy goes out.

all in all i went through 5 boards (the last one just to be absolutely sure i had pinned down the exact problem).

you remember those aztech soundcard/modem combos? well, this particular packard bell had one, along with the very early dos pnp drivers in the config.sys. i hadnt bothered removing them, but, every time you would allow the computer to boot and actually process the config.sys, you would fry that particular models floppy port.

those boards were so insane. i remember one model had BOTH slot 1 and socket 370 onboard, that looked crazy. (it even had an onboard tvtuner iirc.) im amazed that brand is still around.

Try PCLinuxOS

[bogaboga]

If these claims are right, I urge folks to try PCLinuxOS. Having tried it two weeks ago, I can say that I am very very impressed. In fact, I find it better than all other Linux distros I have tried.

Distrowatch http://www.distrowatch.com/ says it too, which means others agree.

Re:AHA! :D

[Killjoy_NL]

heh, Vista is ok for me for now, wouldn't use it in the workplace yet though.

2 Cool things:

Aero (for 10 minutes, then I went back to classic)
Nice volume manager (better than the one in XP)

and for now it has been as stable as a rock, all my hardware was supported.

Me co-worker though, he hates it with a vengeance, he is very annoyed by all the confirmations it asks for, even though he knows how to turn it off, he's always thinking about how a "normal" user would respond to this experience. I completely understand that, but for personal use, it's fine just now.