Newbie to this forum and Ubuntu

[saugen48]

A little history first...daughter (40) spilt a little juice on her HP Minibook 210..she called right after it happened and told her to take out the battery and leave it off for a couple of days..today was the third day...booted it up..and it doesnt see the HDD..I'm thinking some juice got in there and destroyed it...Of course, she didnt make her restore disks either...so, I thought I would try running Ubuntu off of a thumbdrive..Followed the exact procedure for installing the Universal USB Installer on the thumb drive then installed Ubuntu 10.10 notebook on the thumb drive...Changed the boot sequence to USB...plugged in the USB drive then booted computer...followed it thru the loading and it stopped at
ata1 Soft reset Failed (device is not ready)..then it reported "ata1 Device is slow loading" be patient
Then the ata1 soft reset failed again..then it seemed to skip over that and went to the end of the load...the purplish screen with Ubuntu 10.10 comes up and thats it..froze there...tried this whole thing a couple of times from dumping the thumbdrive, reformating, then reloading the Universal USB installer and 10.10 again..still no joy...went back to version 10.04 netbook to see if there might be a diff...same problem same place...any idea what the ata 1 is and why the soft reset failed...suggestions???

Hp Mini, dead HDD, 1GB RAM...it did have win7 starter

[Rubberman]

Well, my grandson spilled a soda on the laptop I gave him and it "let the smoke out". He took it apart, cleaned it all up, and found that the drive was toast. Lucky for him I gave him 2 system drives for the laptop, and it was "only" the Windows HDD that died! The Ubuntu disc was still fine, since it wasn't installed at the time. He switched to Linux, and never looked back - and he doesn't keep his sodas too close to the system any longer!

[devils casper]

any idea what the ata 1 is and why the soft reset failed...suggestions???

It's your Hard disk, ata1 and Linux is not detecting it or disk is not responding at all.
Try to boot up in command line mode and check the output of fdisk -l command.

[saugen48]

It was in fact the HDD, removed it, rebooted with the linux thumbdrive and all is well...the only problem I am having now is the BroadcomB43 wireless...cant find a driver for it...apparently there was some proprietary issue and linux doesnt have it (something along those lines)..anyone know or have a link to the required driver

[Rubberman]

Go to System->Administration->Additional Drivers, and it should provide you with a link to a driver for your BC43 device. They do it that way, so it is YOUR decision whether or not to install "proprietary" software.

[saugen48]

Further to my initial query....as mentioned after taking the HDD out, it was able to load Ubuntu 10.10...however, after shutting down the netbook then starting it up sometime later, it would not load...the thumbdrive would flash a couple of times and the cursor would be blinking on the black screen or after writing the first line of text "Loading drivers needed to access disk drives"..thats it....did another load of the thumbdrive with Ubuntu 9.4 and same thing..initially it worked ok but after shutdown the blinking cursor...tried with linux Mint and Puppy Linux...same deal...with the wireless, its funny, Puppy Linux seen both the wired and Wireless devices and loaded both drivers..
Any idea why the thumbdrive seems to work for one instance and thats it...I was using a couple of different (newish) thumbdrives for this, not just one.Update.Just finished using the thumbdrive in two window laptops running Vista and Win7
Appreciate any insight