I have an Acer laptop with an i3 chip and the standard amount of RAM, probably 4GB that I bought in 2011. Just over a year after I bought it, and just weeks after the end of warranty, the hard drive died. I'm wondering how hard it would be to buy a new hard drive and install Ubuntu or something like that. Is it possible? If so, how much of a pain is it to set up drivers? Would I have to manually install drivers for nearly everything (USB ports, wireless receiver, etc)?
posted by KokuRyu on Jan 10, 2013 - 13 answers

I have a HP Mini 110 with a 160 GB HD running Ubuntu. I'm pretty happy with it, but I don't really need all that space (currently I'm filling a tiny portion of it) and would prefer a faster boot time. What kind of improvements in speed should I expect if I swap out the hard drive with an SSD? What is the level of expense and difficulty involved in the install? Would I be better off just getting a newer notebook with an SSD already installed? What is the best source for a suitable SSD?
posted by Artw on May 10, 2010 - 15 answers

How can I wipe a hard drive if I can't boot from CD and there is no floppy drive? We want to install winXP on a machine with Ubuntu (eventual dual-boot). [more inside]
posted by billtron on Jan 28, 2007 - 14 answers

Debian won't find my hard drive! Please help! I have details so there's [more inside]
posted by tdreyer1 on Jul 12, 2006 - 14 answers

I have a old PC. I want to buy a big new (non-boot, second) hard drive. Will I have problems? [more inside] [more inside]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken on Jan 14, 2004 - 6 answers