9.10 installer doesn't see SATA drive

[cgarvey]

Hi,

I'm trying to install 9.10 and have run in to a problem. When I get to the "Prepare partitions" page, there are no drives listed. If I quit the installer (and the desktop loads), I can see the drive in Disk Utility (and edit partitions, etc.). There, the drive is listed as /dev/sda, but I get "unable to open" if I try and fdisk it.

I'm using the 32-bit Desktop CD of 9.10, and my motherboard is an ABit AB8 Quad GT. It has an Intel SATA controller (lspci lists it as 82801HR/HD/HH). The hard drive is a Samsung 160GB SATA (obviously!), and works fine. It is connected to the first SATA port (tried others without success).

Finally, the SATA controller can be set to AHCI or IDE in the BIOS, and neither work.

Any clues as to where to go from here?

Thanks in advance

[Cr0n_J0b]

I don't know the full answer to this, but I might be able to help a little.

I think the installer partition system looks at the drives MBR and drops drives that it thinks already are in use by another OS. I'm thinking someone smart said "hey, here's a good idea, we can keep users out of trouble by not letting them accidentally partition live drives". This is, by the way, my own opinion. I have no real evidence to support it. I only have some experimental data from my own installation hell.

In my case, I could load a single drive (new) and the partitioner would see it. I could then load the OS and it would work fine. I went back to reload the OS, for some reason, but this time...the same drive, on the same port...was not seen by the partitioner.

I then took another new drive out and placed it in the system...and it was seen by the partitioner. I put both drives in and only the new one was seen.

It doesn't make a difference what port (raid, non raid etc) or what drive type.

Another interesting point...I do all my installs with the nodmraid flag (becuase I hate and don't need DMRAID) This could be part of the problem as well, but I don't know.

MY SUGGESTION:
try to format the drive at a low level. kill the MBR and kill any and all remnant partition or bootloader data from the drive. Make it fresh and I would be you dolllars to doughnuts that it will be seen in by the partitioner.

[cgarvey]

I think the installer partition system looks at the drives MBR and drops drives that it thinks already are in use by another OS.

Bingo! Thanks for that. Once I cleared the MBR, I was good to go. Oddly, I was also able to stick in my Windows HDD and the installer seemed to "skip" that one, but by Ubuntu HDD was now visible in the installer (with an old Windows XP MBR on there still). So, maybe, it just checks for 1 disk that has OS on it.

The mind boggles that there is no indication of the disk it can't use at all, or an option to overwrite after confirming it 20 times or something.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to post; it's got me sorted!