[SOLVED] Can't see my disk to do the partitioning...

[LBS]

Hi,
I'm trying to install Mint 9, but when I get to the "Prepare partitions" I cannot see my hard drive. I couldn't find the answer in the forum... Did anybody have the same problem?
I'm using the DVD of Mint based on KDE. My drive is a SATA (usually this is the problem when I try to install a linux distro... I always type all-generic-ide).
Thank you.

[oobetimer]

Hi,
I'm trying to install Mint 9, but when I get to the "Prepare partitions" I cannot see my hard drive. I couldn't find the answer in the forum... Did anybody have the same problem?
I'm using the DVD of Mint based on KDE. My drive is a SATA (usually this is the problem when I try to install a linux distro... I always type all-generic-ide).
Thank you.

The key-word is dmraid

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... id#p315075

[LBS]

oobetimer,
thanks for the reply, but that didn't work... with "sudo dmraid -r -E /dev/sda" I get "no block devices found" (same for sdb).
I also tried "sudo apt-get remove dmraid"... didn't work as well.Do you have other suggestions?

[willie42]

Lets see what Linux tells us about your disk.

Code: Select all

sudo lshw -C disk

please post the output and see if we can assist you

[LBS]

Lets see what Linux tells us about your disk.

Code: Select all

sudo lshw -C disk

please post the output and see if we can assist you

I'll do that this weekend and post the output... it's not really my computer (I installed Mint Gloria on my girfriend's PC, she liked it and I'm trying to install the newest release).
The same Mint DVD works just fine in my computer, which also contains a HD with SATA... this means that my ".iso" was perfectly downloaded and that it´s not a problem with SATA disks. Perhaps her hardware is the problem...
After trying that code you posted, maybe i'll try to switch her HD with mine to see if we get a different response...

[LBS]

Lets see what Linux tells us about your disk.

Code: Select all

sudo lshw -C disk

please post the output and see if we can assist you

The output shows only information about the dvd drive...
It doesn`t show information about the hard drive.

PS: I have a external drive and, when I plug it in, the installer sees it. Dolphin sees the external drive too, but doesn`t see the hard drive (internal) where I want to install mint.

[willie42]

Its not seeing the Drives are they seen in the BIOS? if not then I would be checking jumper settings on the Drives and making sure your cables connecting the Drives are in good shape

[LBS]

Its not seeing the Drives are they seen in the BIOS? if not then I would be checking jumper settings on the Drives and making sure your cables connecting the Drives are in good shape

That's not the problem. The HD contained Mint Gloria and Windows XP and I had no problem. Bios sees it perfectly. There is only on HD, which is set to master. The only problem I had was that both OS were freezing after some time of usage. I thought that the problem was connected to the temperature (I'm from Brazil). But the problem I'm having now, conjugated with the fact that I already fixed some ventilation issues, puts me in a diferent direction.

It looks like we have some kind of hardware or hardware compability problem. Here's why I think that:

I removed my girlfriend's HD from her PC and pluged it in mine. Thanks to that, I was able to successfully install Mint 9 on her HD. However, when I plug it back into her PC, a new problem (which seems to be connected with the prior problem) arises. I choose mint in grub and Mint stops loading to show me this alert: "Alert! /dev/disk/by-wid 77282896-5f36-42d3-ab13-8dabd0cc2978 does not exist. Dropping to the sell". From that point I only get a shell (initramfs). Windows XP still works.

I also tried putting my HD in her PC (I wanted to see what would happen)... Mint live DVD cannot see it (although it sees my HD in my PC).

It's not a HD malfunction (it works fine in my PC)... it's not the sata cable (I tried a different one)... it's not Mint (it works fine in my PC)... So, it looks like I have a problem with the SATA port on the motherboard.

Would you agree?

PS: I'll try to to test other parts of her PC to pinpoint the source of our problem... maybe it's not the SATA port itself...

[k3lt01]

Ok there is a trick to this and if Mint keeps the regular Ubuntu installer I may be able to walk you through it.

There are 2 things to look for BIOS setting (which you say above is already checked) and the Ubuntu installer itself. Now the installer will ask you if you want to set up a RAID or something, DO NOT DO IT because the installer will then not see the hdd.

I have had this exact issue since I installed my 1TB SATA in the release GRUB2 was released in (9.04 I think).

If your BIOS is correct then you just need to try different settings within the installer, the above is how I got mine to work.

[LBS]

Hello,

I've been away because I was buying stuff to put together a new PC. So let's see what's new...

I bought a new hard disk and swaped with the old HD (the one I thought was problematic)... turns out the Mint installer can't see the new HD too... which means that the first HD was not the problem. In fact, I put the old one in a new PC and was able to install MINT and use it perfectly.

I changed sata cable... it's not the cable. I changed also the sata port I was using... I still got the same problem. BIOS saw both hard drives.

The motherboard is Asus A8V-X.

It's necessary to remember that I get the same problem with kubuntu...

Maybe I should change to a non-ubuntu based distro...

[LBS]

Just tried Open Suse... it also didn't see the hard drive. I don't know what to do... I think I'm going to see if old distros work...

[wayne128]

Check what your partition details :
Boot up computer using Mint or other Linux OS,
do a sudo fdisk -l ( or fdisk -1, depending on the OS), then post all the results on this hard disk.

[LBS]

I tried Mint Gloria... removed the quiet splash... it appears that linux cannot identify the hard drive... i won't be able to see anything in the terminal (fdisk, lshw etc)... it tries to identify and, when it can't, it tries to limit the hd to 1.5 Gbps (SATA 1)... that doesn't help and it moves on without identifying the hard drive. The message says "qc timeout".
Tomorrow I'll try to do something else...

[LBS]

I solved the problem... Let`s see what I did:
When booting from a live DVD, I didn`t allow to automatic boot. Instead, I pressed "tab" to edit the command line and added pci=nomsi before quiet splash. That allows the live DVD to see my hard disk.
Then I installed Mint and rebooted from the live DVD.
I had to insert pci=nomsi in the /etc/default/grub. To do that, I edited the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="pci=nomsi quiet splash".
At that point I had to update grub. As I needed to do that from the live DVD, I had to type lots of commands in the terminal:
sudo fdisk -l (list hard disk partitions so you can determine which is your system partition)
sudo mount /dev sdZX /mnt (Z is the letter and X is the number of your system partition)
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo chroot /mnt
update-grub
sudo reboot
Then I booted from the hard disk and it worked perfectly!