Activate driver and complete installation

Question

Background:

I have a Dell Mini 9 that came with Ubuntu 8-something preinstalled. I created an Ubuntu 11-something installation USB. Booting from the USB, I was able to download/install the proprietary driver to connect wirelessly to the internet. However, Ubuntu 11 would not fit on my 3.8 hard disk. I created an installation USB with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, ran it off the USB, then apparently successfully installed it on my hard disk. However, I cannot load a driver for wireless internet access.

Here is what happens when I boot from the hard drive:

gdu-notification-daemon One or more hard disks report health problems. Click the icon to get more info.

Clicking on the icon yields: 3.8 GB Hard Disk - ATA STEC ATA DISK vS020.1.0 Disk is being used outside design parameters

When I go to System, Administration, Hardware Drivers, it says: Downloading package indexes failed, please check your network status. Most drivers will not be available.

Then, when I close that box, the "Hardware Drivers" window is blank except for: No proprietary drivers are in use on this system.

My goals/problems: I'm not sure what to say about my hard disk problem, but that aside, it seems I am dead in the water in any event if I can't get a driver to enable wireless internet.

Potential questions: Is there a way to fix my hard disk? Another way to install Ubuntu (10.x? 11.x?) to make the hard disk problem go away?? If I fix the hard disk problem, will I be able to access the drivers? Or is there a way for me to go online with my other computer (running Windows XP) and download the necessary driver (which one?) to then load onto my Mini 9 via USB?

Thank you very much for the help of this great community!

Answer 1

It looks like the two problems are unrelated.

To get the wireless driver (probably Broadcom's STA), plug in an ethernet cable and try installing it.

To fix the 'disk problems', I'd try formatting. Something must have gone wrong when creating partitions.

Answer 2

The hard drive issue: Karmic

Power Management does not work in Ubuntu 9.10, does not suspend or resume, or hibernate, sleep... if it would go in, it locks up. Broadcom wifi does not work on liveUSB, you'll have to install and navigate to the pool directory and install drivers off the USB install media with dpkg. It is speedy, and the power management issues might have something to do with having an SD card mounted http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/ubuntu-netbook-remix/14722-suspend-hibernate-mini-9-broken.html. Also, the 4gb SSD drives report being ran outside of parameters

As far as using anything beyond this,(Kermic) the mini 9 just isn't powerful enough to handle more or at least a standard installation. You might try Lubuntu https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu