yes it may be that you need some more exploring before committing to a hard drive system.
there are tons of info on how a system boots but the short answer is bios to bootloader to kernel to init scripts
ONe of those init scripts is to load weather and you may find the weather one in /etc/init.d which contains all the services that you can have on or off at bootup called by your runlevel....see /etc/inittab for your runlevel if excited by such info.
But the script to call the weather will actually exist in /etc/rc5.d/.....where I assume ubuntu uses runlevel 5 for multi user gui logins.
2) leaping ahead....pls consider d/loading a good live cd....if you like debian style there are heaps to choose from at
www.distrowatch.com
and just get used to using either su or sudo to read your system logs and troubleshoot your hardware such as the media readers.
I am not sure if you had already done that but it seems to me you may benefit from a little bit more reading of logs.