no drives found?

[mr-woof]

I'd definitely check the physical connection, but it sounds like the drive is dead. You could try burning gparted to a live cd and see if it picks it up.

[Bashing-om]

kickin ;

Looks like we are back to trying to zero out the disk with dd .... here goes
I suggest that you look at the manual " man dd " in terminal . This command is awesome but very powerful and will destroy if used in a inappropriate manner.
OK
From the live cd (so your devices are not mounted) in terminal paste/copy this:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

this command sequence is for only one drive installed (hence /dev/sda).
There will be no echo to the terminal of any output (work-around-below) until finished.... will take a long time ... my 500G drive took 2 hours to complete.

here is the way to get a status on "dd"

open up another terminal and enter this code:

ps -ef | grep dd

in this result look for the line that designates dd's process ... NOT the process of the grep for dd's process...you will need the process numbers from the first column (this is the pid).
ok ?
enter this code in the same (#2) terminal:

sudo kill -SIGUSR1 <the pid number>

without the brackets in the above, just to show what/where to place pid.

the output from this terminal will be in your first terminal after a bit of number crunching... In 'bout an hour input the above again to get updated status...

when done see if Gparted from the live cd will see the disk and then install a great operating system and enjoy!

HTH <====BDQ

[Kickinthedoor]

Thanks for the info, im gunna give it a shot. the drive is only 80gb so hopefully it goes a bit quicker then your 500. ill post my results

[Bashing-om]

Kickin;

Just checking in see how it is going ... let us know ...if all goes good you'll be up and running tonight.

Best of luck <===BDQ

[Kickinthedoor]

just about ready to run that comand. crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. ill post my progress thanks again

[Kickinthedoor]

ok so based on your time of 2 hours im guna say something went wrong. heres what i have from terminal 1

To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M
dd: writing `/dev/sda': No space left on device
240+0 records in
239+0 records out
250974208 bytes (251 MB) copied, 19.7607 s, 12.7 MB/s
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

and i ran the command to see the progress and got this

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ps -ef | grep dd
root         2     0  0 23:34 ?        00:00:00 [kthreadd]
root      1310     2  0 23:35 ?        00:00:00 [pccardd]
ubuntu    3727     1  0 23:37 ?        00:00:00 /bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 9 --session
root      3847  3809  0 23:37 ?        00:00:00 hald-addon-input: Listening on /dev/input/event4 /dev/input/event2 /dev/input/event1 /dev/input/event6 /dev/input/event5 /dev/input/event0
root      3857  3809  0 23:37 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-generic-backlight
root      3867  3809  0 23:37 ?        00:00:00 hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sr0 (every 2 sec)
root      3869  3809  0 23:37 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/hal/hald-addon-cpufreq
108       3870  3809  0 23:37 ?        00:00:00 hald-addon-acpi: listening on acpid socket /var/run/acpid.socket
ubuntu    4140  4123  0 23:46 pts/1    00:00:00 grep --color=auto dd
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

also not sure what the process numbers are, i hope your hanging around your computer. i dont want to loose any progress if ive even made any

[Bashing-om]

Kickin ...
the output from dd is as shud be upon completion of zeroing out the disk......

uuuhhh I hope it ran about 20 minutes...if the dd command had finished then the kill command had nothing but garbage in ... is this what happened ??? I hope!

[Bucky Ball]

This might be off the ball but are you sure you're attempting to install Ubuntu, desktop or alternative, and not Wubi, which is intended for installation inside Windows?

If you don't have Win up and running, it will be impossible to install Wubi, if this is the scenario.

[Kickinthedoor]

heres how it went down. i started the dd comand. as you can see it only took about 19 seconds to complete. i then checked the progress with a second terminal. (also posted the results. i havent killed the process yet because im unsure of the PID. i tried looking up some more info to help me out but honestly it might as well be written in russian

[Kickinthedoor]

@bucket ball yea im sure. Ive used this disk multiple times to install ubuntu on laptops and desktops