I've had a Dell Latitude laptop since about 2000 without managing to destroy it. A month ago the Windows 2000 system on it did something stupid to its file system and Windows was completely lost.

No point in reinstalling Windows 2000, so I installed an Ubuntu Linux on the laptop. Everything seems normal (installed, rebooted, I can log in, run GnuChess, poke about).

... but ... when I attempt to launch Firefox from the top bar menu icon, I get a bunch of disk activity, the whirling cursor icon goes round a bit and then

(WAS: everything stops: icon, mouse. Literally nothing happens for 5 minutes. Ubuntu is dead, as far as I can tell. EDIT : on further investigation, spinning icon, mouse operated by touchpad freeze. There's apparantly a little disk activity occuring about every 5 seconds. I wait 5-10 minutes, behavior doesn't change)

A reboot, and I can repeat this reliably. So on the face of it, everything works but Firefox. That seems really strange.

The only odd thing about this system when Firefox is booting is that while it has an Ethernet port (that worked fine under Windows), it isn't actually plugged into an Ethernet. As this is the first Firefox boot since the Ubuntu install, maybe Firefox mishandles Internet access? Why would that crash Ubuntu?

(I need to go try the obvious experiment of plugging it in).

EDIT: I tried to run the Disk manager tool, not that I cared what it was, just a menu-available application. It started up like Firefox, I get a little tag in the lower left saying Disk P*** something had started, and then the same behavior as Firefox. At this point, I don't think its the Ethernet. Is it possible that the Ubuntu disk driver can't handle the disk controller in this older laptop? The install seemed to go fine.