Mint Installer does not recognise HD

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bwestoz
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Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by bwestoz »

Mint Installer does not recognise HD

I have an old 32bit PC MB=Intel D945GTP CPU=Pentium D 3.2GHz, RAM=3G, HD=250GB, that I'm trying to install Mint on. I've succeeded in installing xp and also Q4OS on it. I've also run a couple of distros within Virtual Box on XP on it.

However, when I attempt to install Mint on the hardware (I've tried Mint 10 & Mint 19 32bit, both USB + CD), the installer does not see the HD. If I open gparted within Mint live, it can see the partitions but when I run the installer if shows blank at the partition window.

I've searched forums etc and found a couple of people with similar problems but no resolution so far.

Any helpful suggestions about what might be the cause or how to workaround would be appreciated.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
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Larry78723
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Re: Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by Larry78723 »

Do you have any unallocated space on that drive? If not, you'll have to shrink the partitions so you have at least 30GB unallocated space.
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bwestoz
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Re: Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by bwestoz »

Thank you for your reply.

I've tried with the HD in various states, empty, formatted for Win, manually formatted with ext4/swap.

The problem is that the installer doesn't display the drive info at all, just an empty white space.

If I open a terminal and start gparted while Mint live is running (from either USB or CD) it sees everything OK and I can make changes etc.

But if I start 'Install Linux Mint' after it prompts me for language, keyboard and codecs it shows the partition window with blank white space. No drive is shown and nothing is available from menus etc. It’s impossible to continue from this point.
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Larry78723
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Re: Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by Larry78723 »

Can you give us a screenshot of what you're seeing in GParted?
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bwestoz
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Re: Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by bwestoz »

gparted_ss.png
bwestoz
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Re: Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by bwestoz »

Just to be a little clearer, He's a screenshot showing the whole desktop. Notice that gparted sees the drive/partitions but the installer doesn't.
desktop_gparted_installSF.png
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ricardogroetaers
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Re: Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by ricardogroetaers »

No idea to suggest.
Assuming the installation media is not defective, try unmounting the ext4 partition (in the figure represented by sda1) and disabling swap.

Editing:
Another user with the same problem.
viewtopic.php?f=46&t=350842

Is there anything strange about the Mint installer?
bwestoz
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Re: Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by bwestoz »

Turns out I had to run this command:

dmraid -r -E /dev/sda

It asked me if I wanted to remove sil from /dev/sda and I chose Y. Then the installer worked.

It seems that somewhere it it's history the drive had some kind of RAID configuration.

A few unanswered questions though - why it didn't seem to matter for XP, Q4OS, gparted, or

stop Mint live from mounting and accessing it.

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JOPETA
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Re: Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by JOPETA »

I doubt it was a SATA controller problem (if set to RAID but no array created) as gparted doesn't show a RAID volume with partitions but a disk with partitions in your case. Disk forming RAID array is not accesed directly nor by Mint isntaller neither by gparted. As it has no MBR it wont show /dev/sda but /dev /dmX /dev/mapper/isw.... Any way you can check as per your MOBO product guide (point 4) in BIOS setup>Advance> Drive Configuration>Configure SATA as it is AHCI not RAID .

Unmounting partitions as ricardogroetaers said would work (if disk is in use by gparted can't be accesed by Mint installer at the same time). Maybe removing a disk from a non defined matrix/array woud just obly system to re-detect disk, unmounting and removing mounting point already created in the same way.

In other hand, is not rare disks having dirty first sector (MBR) when using different disk managers/partitioning tools (Mint installer, Debian installer, gparted, gnome-disk, fdisk,..) and each tool solve that problem in different way when accessing disk partition table. Overwriting MBR (formatting the device not the partiton, i.e. creating a new partition table with gparted/Disks/..., if going to install from scratch) or re-writing partition table (with another tool as fixparts, testdisk,..., if want to keep pre-existent partitions) would solve that problem with dirty MBR in most cases. Maybe removing RAID volume metadata work in the same way but it scapes my knowledge.
Last edited by JOPETA on Mon Jun 21, 2021 3:07 am, edited 5 times in total.
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bwestoz
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Re: Mint Installer does not recognise HD

Post by bwestoz »

I doubt the disk was ever used as RAID.

It seems weird to me that gparted had no problem reading and editing it, I could install XP no problem, I could install Q4OS (a debian based distro) with no probem and Mint Live could see the drive.

However, when I started the Mint installer it couldn't see the drive. I spent about 3 days trying all kinds of things, reformatting the drive, plugging it into different SATA slots, using USB, DVD, CD, various MINT versions, unplugging the network cable, changing BIOS settings - nothing worked.

Then I ran the dmraid command and it worked.

In the old days I probably would have tried fdisk /mbr but that command didn't work when I tried it from the live disc. I do wonder if that would have solved it.
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