Loud CD and hard drive noises on IBM R30

[Dara Parsavand]

I've gotten the Ubuntu release candidate to install and work reasonably 
well (except for noise) on my IBM R30 laptop. I also tried one of the 
recent daily builds (with less luck). One thing I noticed from both 
tries is my CDROM (during install) and hard drive (after install) make 
noises they don't make under any other OS (Windows XP, Fedora, Yoper, 
...). The CDROM sounds like the the read head is jarring after it makes 
a quick movement. Hard drive noise is harder to describe, but it is a 
significantly loud low duty cycle (2%) noise.

  How can this be? Wouldn't these drivers be similar across Linux 
distributions? I hadn't installed a Debian derived distribution on this 
laptop before, so I tried UserLinux as a comparison. It doesn't have 
the CD noise (but it's only a 5 MB image so the seek distance is less). 
It also has normal hard drive noises.

  Has anyone else experienced something like this? Should I file a bug 
report?

  Dara Parsavand