install can't recognize SATA blu-ray/cd-rom

[gilbert_u]

I try to install 64-bit desktop and can get far enough for the kernel to load and to the point it tries to mount the installation CD. Then it quits with a BusyBox ash shell complaining not being able to find any "medium".

I have two SATA harddrives, one each attached to /dev/sda and /dev/sdb and those seem fine. But "cat /dev/sdc" (where the cdrom drive is) says "no medium found".

I also tried the alternate desktop CD and it also complaints not being to find the cd-rom during the installation process, and asks me if I have any module/driver I can load.

I have an HP Pavillion Elite desktop with a Blu-Ray/cd-rom player. Is the drive too new to be compatible with Linux? Is there a way to force installation to see it as a simple cd-rom drive? If not, anyone knows of any place to get a driver module? I searched hard in Google and couldn't find any so far.

Thanks!

[gilbert_u]

by the way, an old 9.04 32-bit CD seems to work and mounts the blu-ray drive as /dev/sr0 and /dev/scd0 (one is a link to the other). So it is puzzling why this doesn't work with 10.04.

I guess I could potentially try to install 9.04, and then upgrade to 9.10, and then upgrade to 10.04 to avoid this issue, but it sounds like a pain...

[davidmohammed]

try examining your bios - see if you can switch your cdrom drive from SATA to ide-emulation. That should be enough to get your installation to work.

Once installed, you can reverse and then see if a later kernel will help.

[gilbert_u]

Thanks David but "IDE mode" for the SATA controller doesn't help (the only relevant thing I can change in BIOS)

turns out that the key was 32-bit. the 10.04 i386 CD mounts the cd-rom fine, but not the amd64.

This is also the case with 9.04.

[green slime]

I too, have this problem. Most irritating.

[nyteryder79]

Same HP Elite, same exact problem. Very annoying. I managed to install 10.10 x64 using a USB flash drive, but when Ubuntu boots to the desktop, the blu-ray drive isn't detected and won't even power on. Yes! That's right! When booting Ubuntu 10.10 AMD64, the blu-ray drive looses all power. Not to mention it won't shutdown properly and hangs on shutdown and when rebooting, the BIOS freezes up. I have to force shutdown when the BIOS freezes, then force power-on. Only then after a brief freeze with GRUB, does the PC boot to the Ubuntu logon screen. I'm not sure who to blame here... Bad BIOS from HP, or the supposed blu-ray support in the new Ubuntu 10.10. Very annoying.

[Edit]
I disabled the port in BIOS that the blu-ray drive is installed to and I no longer have any issues. I noticed dmesg error for ata3 that was the cause of my issue. Turns out it's related to SATA_PMP or SATA Port Multiplier. The only way to fix it is to recompile the kernel with sata_pmp=n option. I'm not about to do that. I'll just disable it until the next kernel update and boot into Windows if I need to burn or use the drive at all. Hopefully by then I'll see a fix. These days with flash drives I rarely used the blu-ray drive anyway.