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Problems with ubuntu/Linux hardware drivers?

OK, I have a little problem with Ubuntu 8.04. I installed it as just a secondary OS with Vista. It ran great and found all the hardware drivers. I wanted to get rid of vista, so I reformatted my HD so I could just install ubuntu. It installed but it won't find all of the hardware drivers. I have tried 32 bit and 64 bit (my computer can handle both) with no accomplishment. To see the full story, go to the link below. I made a post on afterdawn forums and no one could help me... http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/683092 I have tried ubuntu 8.04 (which worked the first time) and ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 2

Public Comments

1. My reading of what you wrote is (1) you installed it as a dual-boot and everything worked fine; and (2) you reformatted the harddrive and reinstalled the same version and it now doesn't work. You can try to fix it, or you can try simply doing another complete install - unless you have this driving urge to understand and fix the problem, a reinstall strikes me as the best option.
2. I said it recently among some Linux-knowledgeable friends -- who disagreed -- but one of the annoying things about Debian and all its derived distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, DSL etc is they will ALL occasionally not recognize hardware which on other occasions they will recognize. I do most -- not all -- my computing on Debian itself so I am obviously prepared to face this. Assuming you know the hardware and drivers which are not registering, find the packages which are not using them (make they aren't being found by opening a terminal and typing "lsmod" and then doing a dpkg-reconfigure, as in "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" which reconfigures your xserver. One place to start looking is Linux-on-laptops.com. I've linked to the Hewlett-Packard page and the closest relevant models (both of which talk about altering your xorg.conf file which on Ubuntu or Debian you do with the dpkg-reconfigure command whether directly or through a front end (I can't be bothered with). A good way to get general information is http://www.google.com/linux