FYI, there's a slashdork article today about Ubuntu harming laptop HDs, see http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/30/1742258 Also there's a wiki page with some discussion and workaround https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DanielHahler/Bug59695 -- "Thou shalt not follow the null pointer for at it's end madness and chaos lie."