Severe hard drive performance issues

[Seonix]

Hi all,

I installed Kubuntu on my HP dv9008tx only a couple of months ago. Everything was running really well, very fast and reliably. Now, very suddenly, everything seems to lock up all the time. It took 20 minutes to open Kate today and whenever I clicked a link in firefox, it hung for about 2 minutes.

The hard drive light goes crazy when this happens and everything locks up. The CPU load reports less than 5% usage and any open applications run relatively smoothly. This is driving me insane and I would really appreciate any advice.

Thanks

[Gullible Jones]

Are you using an Intel chipsed (i.e. PIIX IDE controller)? If so, try booting with hdx=noprobe (repeated as needed for each IDE drive) appended to the kernel line.

(Note that you may have to edit your fstab first, to have /dev/sdx instead of /dev/hdx - otherwise you will get a kernel panic.)

[Seonix]

I am new to linux, could you please give me some brief instruction on how to do this on Kubuntu?
Also I have a SATA hard drive if that makes any difference

[devils casper]

Open Konsole and execute this

sudo fdisk -l
grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf
sudo lspci | grep -i vga

Post output here.