Troubleshooting Ubuntu

One of my friends, Greg, has decided to give Linux a try on an oldish PC that he has. After seeking some advice, from yours truly, he decided to install Ubuntu. Apparently, he used the Live CD and installed via Windows. Everything was fine until he rebooted and deleted the Windows partition.

The system still booted fine but wouldn't find his CD, DVD or external Hard Drive. The system knew they were there but wouldn't mount them. Unfortunately, with me not being physically there, it proved a bit elusive and time consuming to troubleshoot what device references Ubuntu was using.

After spending a fair while browsing forums on the net we eventually managed to come up with a foolproof method of detecting the device references and it was then a pretty easy case of making a few alterations to a key configuration file.

The strange thing was that the system was detecting his usb pen drive fine but whenever it was rebooted it would detect the external hard drive on any 1 of 4 possible ports. Easiest solution I could come up with was to tell the system to mount all 4 on boot; 3 would fail but the other would be the right one.

It's probably neither an elegant or particularly smart solution but it works.