Linux Mint Forums

I had a lot of problems with different installs both from cd, dvd, or unetbootin seeing my SATA hdd
Only Mint 4.0 would recognize the drive and install.

My SATA drive is a Seagate 500gb 3.0
I got this from someone pointing me to a bug report in the ubuntu forums about not recognizing SATA drives.

Fix: choose install mode after booting CD or DVD
choose boot options
add pci=nomsi
then install

I did this with Hardy 8.04 and it found my SATA drive right away and installed no problems. Installation running great.


According to the post in ubuntu forums this is not really a bug.....the pci=nomsi is just an option to allow live cd or installer to see the SATA drives....an option that it seems a lot of people dont know about.

Hope this helps....works great for me and will now try it with my Mint 5.0 CD


Thanks for everyones help

Drifter,

That is a really nifty tip that I am sure some others reading the forum can use. That is a good one for the notebook.

I picked up a Seagate SATA 80 GB unit recently for $36 new-in-the-box (bargain!!!), and Mint 5 installed flawlessly. That makes me wonder if it is particular models of Seagates that have an issue. Or is it the motherboard/controller combination? My combo in my signature works great. It would be interesting to read exactly what the problem turns out to be, though.

My original post said that Mint 4.0 CD installed perfectly and that i used the live CD to work on my Seagate with Gparted.

When I tried unetbootin, CD, DVD installs of hardy, Elyssa .48, suse 11 rc1 they all failed to see my hard drive, but Mint 4.0 live cd had no problem at all. When i tried compatibility mode with the others It would always recognize my SATA drive then it could never link up with it and would keep trying every 5 seconds. Maybe the new release Mint 5.0 now has the same installer as Mint 4.0 I have no idea. I just now that what I found was supposed to be a boot option to help linux installers and live CDs see and link to a SATA 11 drive. In all the posts I checked with google it seemed people where having the most problems with seagate drives in general, not controllers.

All I can say is with this boot option Hardy installed no problems

Thanks - it worked for me! Interestingly, when I first couldn't see the drives, I used "System Rescue" v1.0.4 to partition the drives and "System Rescue" had no trouble seeing the SATA drives. "System Rescue" uses Gentoo, so I assume that Gentoo would not have this SATA blindness problem.