Using Tata Photon+ on Ubuntu 12.04

The Huawei modem model EC1260 supplied by Tata Photon is detected automatically by the Network Manager in Ubuntu 12.04 as New Mobile Broadband connection after you wait for one to two minutes. You need to choose country as India, and service provider as Tata Photon+. In addition after setting up you need to edit the connection and write username and password as internet.

Installing Ubuntu on hard disk having bad sectors

Today I was approached for installation of Ubuntu on a Laptop on which the hard disk had many bad sectors. We booted the machine with Ubuntu start up USB disk and started checking the 320 GB hard disk with badblocks command. Then we found that it may take several hours to check the hard drive since it had many many badblocks. We used gparted to make two 20 GB partitions at the beginning of the drive and found that both partitions had bad blocks. We interrupted the command with Ctrl+C if bad block was found. We made 20 GB partition after 100 GB and interrupted the badblocks command because bad block was found. Then we made 20 GB partition after 200 GB and no bad block was found. We decided to install Ubuntu on that EXT4 partition having no bad blocks. We made 200 GB NTFS partition at the beginning of the drive. Following are the screen-shots.

After completing the above operation I thought why not check my Laptop Hard Disk for bad sectors. I booted with the start up disk and used badblocks command to check two ext4 partitions having Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 12.04 and NTFS partition having Windows XP and found no bad blocks. Following is the screen-shot.