I write this in the hope it is of help to you. Note: Please follow the advise below at your own risk. Backup any and all important data! You have been warned.
When I tried to install Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04 (from CD or USB drive), and selected manual partitioning, the installer would not show all my drives.
However, when booting the life CD/USB, gparted or the Disk Utility did recognize all drives and partitions.
It turned out that one of my drives was marked as RAID partition, although I never used RAID!
Here the symptom:
When you run the installer and select "manual partitioning", the resulting list of drives and partitions is incomplete. In my example it was:
sda
- sda1
sdc
- sdc1
- sdc2
- sdc3
...
sdb was missing!
In order to analyze the problem, you can do the following:
cd into a mounted, writable directory (USB stick, persistent)
Open the file.txt and search for "ID_FS_TYPE=". There are usually multiple appearances of it. Check all of them.Code:> udevadm info --export-db > file.txt
If you discover something like that:
E: ID_FS_TYPE=isw_raid_member
E: ID_FS_USAGE=raid
and you do NOT use RAID, then follow the instructions below:
See the lines above the ID_FS_USAGE=raid part and identify the drive, for example: E:
DEVNAME=/dev/sdb
Does it correspond with the missing drive?
If yes, let's make sure we don't damage a RAID installation:
Read what it tells you - did it mount RAID partitions/drives?Code:> sudo dmraid -ay
One more precautionary step:
If there is no or only one drive/partition listed, it is reasonable save to assume you are not running RAID.Code:> ls /dev/mapper
If it says something like /dev/mapper/nvidia_aebhdfib1 ...2 ...5 etc., stop right here and consult an expert.
Once you made sure you don't destroy an existing RAID, let's remove the incorrect RAID mark from the drive:
where X is the drive designation. Don't add a number, we refer to the drive, not to a partition. In my example above the command is:Code:> sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sdX
You may have multiple drives with the RAID metadata on it. In that case you need to repeat the above command for all those drives. Just make sure you don't wipe out your existing RAID, if you have one.Code:> sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sdb
Reboot the system and see if it works.
P.S.: Also check your BIOS settings - do you have drives configured as RAID?
Good luck.
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