Ubuntu

Anyway to disable internal harddrive from Ubuntu?

Asked by cereardon

Hi, I have a Dell xps m140 laptop whose internal hard drive is completely shot (aka I got a DST failure whenever I tried to boot windows from the drive). So I bought an external hard drive and installed Ubuntu onto it from a live CD. the OS runs fine, but whenever I boot up, Ubuntu spends a LOONNNGGG time scanning and finding errors such as "Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block 0" on the internal HDD. It takes about ten minutes to boot into Ubuntu every time I turn my computer on! Is there a way I can make Ubuntu completely ignore the internal drive and not scan it at all, so it won't run this scan every time I boot up? The internal HDD is dead to me, but because I'm not exactly a laptop hardware expert I'd rather not open the case up and rip the hard drive right out.

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Steve (stupendoussteve-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#1

You should be able to disable the drive through the BIOS set up, I don't believe there is a way to completely ignore the hardware within the operating system. The way to access the set up varies, it is often delete or one of the function keys (F8 for example), your manual may be able to help you get in there.

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cereardon (cereardon) said : 		#2

I should have mentioned: In the BIOS setup I was able to disable the internal HDD from booting an OS, but there is no option to remove it completely. Therefore when I turn the computer on it automatically boots Ubuntu from my external drive, but when Ubuntu begins to load it spends a very long time scanning and finding errors on the internal HDD. As I mentioned before, it finds errors on "device sda." I went into Ubuntu's partition editor and saw that there is a partition on sda (which is the erroneous samsung internal hdd in my laptop). However, when I run commands like </dev/sda info> or even </dev/sda rm> I get a message saying "no such file or registry exists."

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midnightflash (midnightflash) said : 		#3

You should pull out the broken hard-drive. Just like changing for a new one... but without pulling the new one in. :-)

Greetings

ps: It will last less than 5 minutes...

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