19 May
After an Ubuntu install go wrong my laptop started coming up with this error message:
The disk drive for X is not ready yet or not present
In my case, the laptop was having trouble with /dev/sda1, my root partition.
The Solution:
The error message above is met with two solutions, press S to skip or M to do a manual install. Press "M" for manual install.
Once you are the command prompt, your drive will have been mounted as read-only, change that like this:
mount /dev/sda1 -o rw,remount
Now that the drive is in read-write again (test with a simple touch /tmp/test), continue the installation with this:
dpkg --configure -a
05 Jan
It was very strange, I got a new 2 TB external USB drive for Christmas and I noticed a number of windows (nautilus windows) opening up throughout the night. So I would wake up to find 20 - 30 windows opened to the media mount directory (/media). Overtime and watching the logs, I noticed that the new USB drive was disconnecting itself and then reconnecting. As it would reconnect and mount, the new mount point /media/<some long character string> would pop open in a nautilus window. When the drive would eventually disconnect, the opened nautilus window would no longer have access to the data and would display contents from one directory up (/media). After a couple days I finally found the answer and tried it and it worked as advertised.
For those having the same problem, this is where I found the solution you see below.
$ sudo sdparm --clear STANDBY -6 /dev/sdb
# note that your device could be something else, for example - /dev/sd<something>
And if you get an error, something like this:
change_mode_page: failed fetching page: Power condition
Then you should be able to use hdparm instead, like this:
sudo hdparm -S 0 /dev/sdb
