really shoulda posted this somewhere more relevant.. the linux section or the UBUNTU FORUMS.. but I will reactivate my dead account and take pity on you by making a suggestion..

That's a hopeless partitioning scheme.. you need a swap area defined.. as usual n00buntu tries to make a non booting or runs like crap system setup..

so why not use the area with the bad sector as /swap .. say the first 500mb's of the 8gb area of the ssd. In reality the situation will just get worse now you have one bad sector.. but you can effect a cure (linux magic follows)

The easiest way is to boot from a USB stick and run:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 (for the smaller 4G SSD)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb1 (for the larger 8G SSD)

This will wipe _everything_ from the disks by writing zeroes to each block. You can verify this by making new file systems (assuming ext3) on the disks with:

mkfs.ext3 -c /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext3 -c /dev/sdb1

That's -c for bad-block scan. After it works, you can just reinstall the system from scratch, but remember my note about defining a proper swap area, especially with a bloat monster like ubuntu.. puppy works way better on these little notebooks.

no reply.. *sigh* .. typical.. next time I'm going to leave them to rot in the "other pc hardware" with all the M$ fanboys.