9.10 SATA install issue

[naaron]

I have a Dell OptiPlex 960. It has a built-in Intel SATA RAID controller. I also have two SATA drives connected to the controller. I have the controller set to Legacy in the BIOS. This allows me to see both drives as sda and sdb. This works well for 9.04 because I do not want RAID.

I just started up the 9.10 install. When it gets to the partitioning screen I only see the drives configured as RAID. I rebooted and chose the nodmraid boot option. Now when I get to the partitioning step I do not see any drives listed. I can view the messages file and see that dmraid was not enabled and I also see both drives listed.

My goal is to install 9.10 in a non-RAID configuration. Anyone got any ideas as to why the drives are not showing up with nodmraid as a boot option?

Thanks

[hwttdz]

Can you see the drives if you select manually configure partitions? This is the final release?

[naaron]

With the nodmraid option all of the buttons except Back are grayed out. I can't do anything except exit the install.

[hwttdz]

And without that option?

[naaron]

Without the nodmraid option, and manually partition I see the following device listed:

/dev/mapper/isw_dehdjachff_ARRAY

If I try to add a new partition, a window pops up asking if I really want to partition the whole device.

Forgot to mention it is the final release.

[naaron]

any ideas?

[Ferrixman]

Same problem here.
I have a Asus P5K mainboard.
Sata controller set to advanced -> ahci, thus NO RAID configured.
If I start the installer without any option, I see my first two disks collected together in a similar manner to how naaron sees them.
If I start the installer with nodmraid option activated, the installer itself will not see my first two hard disks at all.
If I go to System->Administration-> Disk Utility / Gparted, I can clearly see my two disks with their internal partitions, in a normal way. This seems just an installer issue.

Thanks for any help

Luca

[Jerky]

I also have the same problem. Trying to figure it out.

[Ferrixman]

Up

[Dakra]

Hi everybody, I have a similar issue with Kubuntu, which I described here:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3107470.0

There are other hard drives detection problems related threads on kubuntuforums like:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3107366.0

I have tried the different options in my BIOS with no success. With the live CD, I have noticed that fdisk detect correctly my drives and partitions but I cannot mount them. Dolphin does not display them, though it did in previous live CDs.

[puleen]

This is the exact same problem which I am having as well. I've ran the 9.04 Installer and it is able to detect all the drives.

Something is wonky about Karmic installer!

Anyone have any suggestions on what to do to get the drives detected?

[noob12]

Decided to describe my related experiences on this thread. Hope it helps.

I gave up on the normal Live CD install before I knew to try F6 and nodmraid; don't know if that would have addressed things for me or not. I found I was able to do a clean install using the alternate CD.

During installation I unplugged my second SATA drive to avoid confusing the installer and due to concerns it might end up wiping the other drive, which I didn't want to lose.

After installation, I plugged the second drive back in. This caused problems with grub2 on my new 9.10 installation not being able to find the boot device properly. I eventually figured out I had to add nodmraid to the startup options in /etc/default/grub so that the underlying devices would appear. The line I changed now reads:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nodmraid quiet splash"

Added:
NOTE: After changing the line above in /etc/default/grub, you need to run the command

sudo update-grub2
to rebuild /boot/grub/grub.cfg using this value.

[maxol]

So is the general consensus that dmraid is broken in karmic?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1308472

[noob12]

This thread isn't about dmraid being broken per se; wouldn't be able to comment on that because I haven't tried using it. It's more about dealing with Karmic being somewhat overly eager to consider pairs of SATA drives as RAID when you don't want them to be.

[Evil Rabbit]

The nodmraid option did not work for me with the live CD. Ended up using the alternate install CD, which worked well. I was able to make a clean install and boot using the nodmraid kernel line option. I even managed to get my XP boot from a separate hd. Two days of fighting the windmills is finally over. :)

[rickead2000]

I'm having what I believe to be the same problem, although I managed a successful upgrade from 9.04...... until I rebooted.

I got so far as the white logo and it dumped me at a busybox login with a load of errors about could not find devices.

Upon booting the liveCD, I only have /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, none of the partitions seem to be there.

GParted in the liveCD is showing a RAID1 array (old install was not RAID), although I can also see my other partitions, just not do anything with them.

Fiddled around in the BIOS for ages but to no avail. Only way I can get it to boot is to yank out the SATA cable for my other HDD. At which point everything works fine, apart from I've lost an HDD obviously.

I don't mind running either non-raid or raid, but I would like both my HDDs to be able to be plugged in!

Overall, I'm pretty disappointed with 9.10. Along with a doubled (if not tripled) boot time and a horrendous icon theme I might just go back to 9.04.

[Evil Rabbit]

I got so far as the white logo and it dumped me at a busybox login with a load of errors about could not find devices.

I had the same problem. Have you tried passing the nodmraid option in the grub menu? It allowed me to boot into Ubuntu. Also in BIOS, the SATA controller should be disabled and the SATA mode should be IDE (or AHCI possibly, if enabled earlier).

[emacdonald]

Had the same problem, tried the nodmraid option, that didn't work.
But found this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ty/+bug/459054 is the bug in question!

Work around:
Boot up on the live CD go into Synaptic, search for "dmraid" remove all references completely, then go back & do the install via the onscreen icon.

The installer will then see the sata drive.

I did this with only one SATA drive attached while doing the install. Once everything was installed I reconnected all the other drives and all was fine.

Once the OS is installed dmraid is not selected so no problems from then on. Do not know what would happen if you genuinely need dmraid

[rdg1974]

i have the same problem as well...using two SATA WD 250GB HDD's. previous versions never had a problem seeing my two separate drives but 9.10 only sees them as a RAID. One thing i did notice is that they are using the old raid name that I used when the two drives USED to be in RAID, but i separated them over a yr ago and have been running windows on one and 9.04 on the other. I agree that this seems to be an installer problem because GParted has no problem seeing the separate drives.

When I first tried going to 9.10 i tried updating via the update manager, but that only made my linux drive unbootable. It showed the the unbuntu arms logo for a sec then went blank. After pressing a button it was on a screen showing that it tried to mount the volume but couldn't and it couldn't find an init on the volume, and then went to a this prompt: (initramfs)


I tried booting with a live cd and manually mounting the volume to no avail. I could access my file system no problem but getting 9.10 to boot up failed and had to eventually go back to a clean install of 9.04

Awaiting a way to fix my life...

[dhavalbbhatt]

The partition manager seems to broken in Karmic on desktop installation CD - it may be because dmraid is broken. However, the alternate installation CD will work fine. It won't have a GUI, but will do the job just fine. Don't know how many have tried using the alternate CD, but it solved the issue for me.

[rdg1974]

actually, what Emacdonald said about removing all of the references to dmraid from synaptic and then running the installer does work for showing the available drives now. Now I am just going to try the install and see what happens from there.

[Dakra]

In my case, removing the dmraid package allowed the installer to find my partitions but I got another error at the end, saying it could not create/format the / partition. I even tried to create an empty ext4 partition with GParted before launching the Karmic live CD but it didn't work either.

So I used the alternative CD, which asked if I wanted a raid or not, and it worked flawlessly. Now I'm writing from Karmic and everything works fine and is stable. I hope it will stay that way. Excepting the ****** installer process, the new system rocks!

[powerofslack]

Hi, I'm having this same problem. I've upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 and now karmic refuses to see one of my drives and mistakenly believes it to be a RAID array and flips out during boot about how it's not striped right or something. Is there any way to fix this by reconfiguring anything from within Karmic without re-installing Ubuntu from scratch? (sounds like there isn't that anyone has come across). Thanks.

[Ginsu543]

I had exactly this same problem but was able to get around it by doing the following:
1) Unplug all drives except the one I'm installing to
2) Boot into live session using the Live CD
3) Open Terminal and type sudo apt-get remove dmraid
4) Run the installer by double-clicking on the icon

This allowed me to install 9.10. I then reconnected all my drives and rebooted. One point of note: if you install Gparted, make sure to uninstall dmraid again as it gets reinstalled as part of the Gparted package.

[nyteshade]

The partition manager seems to broken in Karmic on desktop installation CD - it may be because dmraid is broken. However, the alternate installation CD will work fine. It won't have a GUI, but will do the job just fine. Don't know how many have tried using the alternate CD, but it solved the issue for me.

This has been an issue, version after version, release after release. Are you guys ever going to fix this?!

[ed-koala]

I've never had any issue with my raid setup and installing ... till 9.10. Now it refuses to boot no matter what I try. I've given up and will wait for a fix from developers, if one ever comes. Alt CD does not fix the problem for me, OS simply won't boot. Bios has no RAID option configuration ANYWHERE (I looked through every entry, every option) so other than physically pulling one hard drive, I can't use 9.10.

[Ginsu543]

Have you tried pulling all but one drive, installing, and reconnecting the other drives? That's how I got Karmic to install on my machine. Once I got the installation in place, Karmic functioned normally when I reconnected the rest of my drives.

[dirkrob]

I had this issue with a AMD SB600 sata controller on a Gigabyte MB. I could only make it work by upgrading my MB BIOS and using the the Alternate install CD.

[paspi]

Hi to everybody,

I have the same problem with a P4C800 asus board.

No sata disks displayed in the installer but I can see it on GParted.

Ihave two sata disks on the controller

[1Nyco1]

I just built a computer for Ubuntu with a Jetway MCP61P motherboard. Imaging my surprise at not being able to install Karmic because it cannot detect the hard drive correctly. I've had to install an old IDE drive to get it working. A Google search reveals hundreds of posts about this in dozens of forums. Would someone please let everyone know when a fix for this is available?

[jpfiset]

The trick posted by emacdonald (removing dmraid references in Synaptic Package Manager) worked for me as well. Thanks.