Comment 35 for bug 441941

I've been telling many friends about Ubuntu for the last year or so but after this bug got me and my HP nx9420 I'm holding off on suggesting ubuntu to anyone. I think this a shame since Karmic seems to have worked so well on my laptop: finding the wirelss access points, having good touch pad response, screen fonts etc.

 I agree with the suggestion of at least having the installation process check to see if the potential for this exists and warning the user. I was left with a completely unbootable or restartable machine except by shutting off power which has the potential for random harddrive corruption. If I did not have an Acronis TrueImage Image backup to do a MBR restore, I would have lost use of the machine as the windows mbr recovery procedure failed as did the GRUB2 Wiki instructions.

BTW Taking an Acronis TrueImage backup of the windows partion before installation worked very well for recovery. i only needed to restore the MBR section which completed in a few minutes. Of course it took me a few days to think of that solution. In the mean time I had to repair Grub from the USB live session, reboot into XP and loose the machine if i rebooted from XP; quite annoying.

I will now try deleting the offending HP components, but I do like the security they offered. Of course Truecrypt is likely a better choice anyway. cheers