Mint 5 live cd cant see SATA hdd

[drifter0000]

This is a little complicated.
I have a Via ACHI/SATA 4 port onboard controller
Original set up was with ata 133 western digital 80gb.....installs and everything worked great no matter what.
Then I installed my first SATA 3.0 drive.....Seagate Barracuda 500gb
In Bios 1st primary ata 80gb, 2nd primary ata cd/dvd burner, third primary Seagate 500gb Sata

To get the most out of my new drive I wanted to do fresh install of hardy 8.04
Installed xp pro sp3 from dvd image....boots fine...udma6 listed in device manager instead of SATA 3.0 but after testing drive my throughput was 82mb and after some research it seemed like this was what I could expect from Sata 3
my ata 133 80gb tested at 51mb so this seemed ok to me.....at this point my southbridge bios was set to SATA

Try unetbootin hardy 8.04 64bit.....failed to see my sata drive
Try live cd suse 11rc1 install.....failed to see my sata drive
Try dvd install suse 11rc1....failed to see my sata drive
Try Mint 4.0 live cd install.....no problems....mint running well...install program recognized SATA as SCSI...I researched and found this was normal for some installs

Removed ata 133 80gb from system.....tried every install again....only Mint 4.0 installs all other installs say I have no hdd

Go back to bios change southbridge SATA to ACHI and I enable SATA from rom

Try all installs again.....says no hdd
Also try unetbootin Mandriva install....installer loads Via ACHI/SATA drivers.....then says I have no hdd

Try fresh install of Mint 4.0 with live cd and new bios settings.....my sata is now listed as 1st primary......Mint 4.0 installs perfectly and new bios settings seem to make a difference because now mint boots very fast.

Ok now I download Mint 5.0 beta 48......live CD stops at initramfs.....no problem i try again with compatability mode....now I can see litsting of whats going on.

Live Cd in compatability mode stops at initramfs as before but does not hang and keeps loading. When it gets to my sata drive it says drive one not seen...then it trys to load some sort of sata 3.0 driver then hangs and says drive not seen....it keeps repeating this process every 5 seconds until I turn off computer.

Any help would be appreciated...I know is long post....thanks for your patience

[Husse]

I suggest staying with Daryna
Every 5 seconds is the interval used for the journaling in ext3 so your disk is partly recognized
Check out the extra boot options in the troubleshooter, and note that there is a section on how to keep them in the installed version
http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php ... d_problems
Compatibility mode is vesa + some of the options mentioned in the how to

[drifter0000]

Thank you for the reply. I took your advice and put the SATA and the PATA drives back in my system. Then I installed daryna on the 500gb SATA works fine.

After these last few days of researching the web I have noticed a lot of problems with linux and SATA posted. Mostly Seagate drives.

Mint 4.0 live cd has an installer that finds and uses my SATA drive. The others I tried do not. So somewhere inside that installer is a good module.

I hope they include it in Ellysa!!!

Thanks again

[Husse]

I'll see if we can find a solution

[drifter0000]

I got some help in ubuntu forums.

In boot options add: pci=nomsi

I tried it with hardy intall this morning, saw my drive right away and installed with no effort. This is supposed to be a boot option to allow distros with problems see the sata drive. Worked like a charm with hardy and I assume it will work now with my other install CD, DVD

Its possible this option was already activated in Daryna and that is why I never had a problem with it.

Thanks for your help. I posted a solved post today. Hope it helps