I love my Dell Inspiron 1420 laptop but I hate its 3.5" hard
drive. About every 12 months I have to replace the hard drive. It is
only logical. If you have incredibly dense disks spinning at 7200 rpm in
a non-stable environment, stuff ‘gon break. I am on my 3rd hard drive
now. Yesterday my wireless stopped working. I popped in an older hard
drive and lo and behold! the wireless worked fine.
I updated the driver firmware from <a
href="http://www.intellinuxwireless.org">intel’s open-source
wireless</a> site and it kind of worked but no longer would connect to a
WPA network. The drivers hosted on that site are updated daily so I
can’t fault them for instability. I could have recompiled my kernel but
that wouldn’t solve my real problem, which is that disk failures are
screwing w/ my boot sector and critical system files.
So I re-installed ubuntu but this time created separate partitions for
/, /usr, /var/, and the great big monster /home. Hopefully, hopefully
this will isolate disk errors to my avi files for "It’s Always Sunny in
Philadelphia".
I can’t claim credit for this great idea. I got it from the sprawling
<a href="http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz">Rute User Tutorial and
Exposition</a>. If there is any single, comprehensive guide to linux for
the sysadmin, this is it.
