10.4 Not Recognizing HDD on install

[Rnegade]

Hi All,

I am trying the 10.4 version from last months APC DVD (I have used 8.4 (liked it) and 9.4 (failed to install) and I am trying to install it on my spare rig to see how it all goes.

System Specs:

Intel E6850 @Stock Speeds (normally OC'd to 3.2GHz)
G.Skill 2GIG DDR2 800Mhz RAM
WD500GIG SATAII Green HDD
Gigabyte P35 Motherboard (latest Bios)
Nvidia 9600GT Palit Sonic GPU

I boot disc from post, goes through the 1st 3 steps, select time zone etc and it wont find my HDD but it will find my USB mem stick when its plugged in.

I will keep fiddling in the bios to make sure that I have everything correct (it works fine when I installed w7 about 2 hours earlier) but does anyone have some suggestions?

I am installing it without dramas on a old P4 1.6GHz s478, 512mb Ram, 40GIG IDE and a old Geforce MX460 GPU and its at 53% so I know that the disc / version is good.

Thanks

[wilee-nilee]

Can you run this from the Ubuntu terminal and post it.
sudo fdisk -l

l=small case L

[Rnegade]

Here you go :). As request. Cancelled install, it booted itself into demo mode running from the disc (but i presume you knew that).

When i go into Places > Computer it shows 3x WD500GIG HDDS... yet there is only 1 HD in the system. Perhaps I need to clean up the disc / wipe it or something.


ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xae5162c2

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 13 60801 488280064 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$

[wilee-nilee]

So you installed Windows 7 on this earlier today, did you shrink W7 with it's disk manager to leave a free space for Ubuntu it looks as though it's fully allocated.

You don't want to resize W7 with gparted but the on board W7 disk manager. Leave a open space and choose install in largest free space from the install partitioner.

Post back if I'm reading the fdisk info incorrectly.

[Rnegade]

I did a reinstall of my windows 7 earlier today as my trial ran out however, since my last post I have formated the HDD / removed any partitions etc and have re run the Ubuntu disc. I demo booted to desktop, went to install from the desktop and it still can not find the HDD.

Really a bit confused at this stage. Its installing onto one of my USB sticks right now but i would like to get it to work on the HDD.

[wilee-nilee]

I did a reinstall of my windows 7 earlier today as my trial ran out however, since my last post I have formated the HDD / removed any partitions etc and have re run the Ubuntu disc. I demo booted to desktop, went to install from the desktop and it still can not find the HDD.

Really a bit confused at this stage. Its installing onto one of my USB sticks right now but i would like to get it to work on the HDD.

Can you take a screen shot of gparted in system-admin-gparted.
You also say you formatted and used the/=root indicator did you click on custom install in the install partitioner.

[Rnegade]

Sure... here it is:

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a196/Rnegade/Screenshot.jpg

I didn't format anything using Ubuntu, i did it with my XP disc - however i think i might try that again with ubuntus utils.

[Knersie]

Hi All,

I am trying the 10.4 version from last months APC DVD (I have used 8.4 (liked it) and 9.4 (failed to install) and I am trying to install it on my spare rig to see how it all goes.

System Specs:

Intel E6850 @Stock Speeds (normally OC'd to 3.2GHz)
G.Skill 2GIG DDR2 800Mhz RAM
WD500GIG SATAII Green HDD
Gigabyte P35 Motherboard (latest Bios)
Nvidia 9600GT Palit Sonic GPU

I boot disc from post, goes through the 1st 3 steps, select time zone etc and it wont find my HDD but it will find my USB mem stick when its plugged in.

I will keep fiddling in the bios to make sure that I have everything correct (it works fine when I installed w7 about 2 hours earlier) but does anyone have some suggestions?

I am installing it without dramas on a old P4 1.6GHz s478, 512mb Ram, 40GIG IDE and a old Geforce MX460 GPU and its at 53% so I know that the disc / version is good.

Thanks

Check your bios settings. For some ridiculous reason ubuntu can only access sataII drives if the IDE ATA/ATAPI ACHI protocol is enabled. Ubuntu can access SATAI drives using the the IDE protocol, but not ACHI drives as the drivers are not included. Most pcs enable the IDE protocol by default. In WIN XP, SATAII drives cannot be accessed using the ACHI protocol, but I believe this was fixed in WIN7. So change your bios setting to enable the ACHI controller prtocol and your problem should be solved. Hope this will be of help. Regards

[wilee-nilee]

The hard disc is filled no space left. Also they are ntfs partitions Ubuntu wouldn't install in those. So explain what you want I think your trying to dual boot with W7 or do you just want Ubuntu?

If you just want Ubuntu delete the partitions with gparted and just install to the whole hard drive.

[wilee-nilee]

Check your bios settings. For some ridiculous reason ubuntu can only access sataII drives if the IDE ATA/ATAPI ACHI protocol is enabled. Ubuntu can access SATAI drives using the the IDE protocol, but not ACHI drives as the drivers are not included. Most pcs enable the IDE protocol by default. In WIN XP, SATAII drives cannot be accessed using the ACHI protocol, but I believe this was fixed in WIN7. So change your bios setting to enable the ACHI controller prtocol and your problem should be solved. Hope this will be of help. Regards

Look at the gparted screen shot then read my reply.

[wilee-nilee]

Really you don't have enough ram=memory to run W7 I would be surprised if it ran with any speed.

The only problem you have is a hard drive full of two partitions that Ubuntu wont install to.

[Rnegade]

So change your bios setting to enable the ACHI controller prtocol and your problem should be solved. Hope this will be of help. Regards

Thanks, I did that in Bios however it didnt help :(.

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a196/Rnegade/Screenshot-1.png

I loaded back up into the Live desktop, checked out the disk utils, deleted everything that was on the drive, rebooted, went to try installing both from ISO and from live desktop and neither still showed the HDD as usuable.

Pictured above is what you see.

At this stage, I have re inserted my w7 Ultimate DVD and I have created the following:

WD500GIG SATAII HDD Partitioned-
50GIG (For Ubuntu when possible)
430GIG (approx) for Windows7 Install.

The w7 install will be my Prefered OS as it will be used for Gaming for mates however it might find itself running Ubuntu for everything else (including web browsing and media playback) for the kids and mrs when they want to be in the PC room.

So yea... this needs to work both ways.

THANKS AGAIN.

[darkod]

1. wilee is right, the whole hdd is taken by win7. You need to use win7 Disk Management to shrink the win7 partition so you have unallocated space on the disk. Do NOT create any partition from the unallocated space from windows.

You said you recently installed win7. If you were already planning to dual boot I wonder why you would give the whole disk to win7 knowing you have to shrink it later??? You are doubling the work and risking corruption during the resize.

Boot win7 few times after the resize to do its disk checks.

2. The hdd might not show in the ubuntu installer if it was used in raid. That leaves meta data on the disk that formatting doesn't remove.

Boot ubuntu in live mode, and in terminal do:

sudo dmraid -r -E /dev/sda

That should ask you do you want to remove settings. If you are NOT using raid, do it and the disk should be visible in the installer.

However you still have the problem of win7 taking the whole hdd, until you shrink win7.

[Rnegade]

Really you don't have enough ram=memory to run W7 I would be surprised if it ran with any speed.

The only problem you have is a hard drive full of two partitions that Ubuntu wont install to.

Are you serious? w7 runs fine on that rig. Has been since the beta of w7. at 3.2GHz, 2gigram and a 9600GT this thing sings! This is a spare gaming rig and plays the games and runs the OS fine.

[darkod]

Look at post #13 and sort your problem. :)

[Rnegade]

1. wilee is right, the whole hdd is taken by win7. You need to use win7 Disk Management to shrink the win7 partition so you have unallocated space on the disk. Do NOT create any partition from the unallocated space from windows.

You said you recently installed win7. If you were already planning to dual boot I wonder why you would give the whole disk to win7 knowing you have to shrink it later??? You are doubling the work and risking corruption during the resize.

Boot win7 few times after the resize to do its disk checks.

2. The hdd might not show in the ubuntu installer if it was used in raid. That leaves meta data on the disk that formatting doesn't remove.

Boot ubuntu in live mode, and in terminal do:

sudo dmraid -r -E /dev/sda

That should ask you do you want to remove settings. If you are NOT using raid, do it and the disk should be visible in the installer.

However you still have the problem of win7 taking the whole hdd, until you shrink win7.

Thank you! As my above post says, I have changed my HDD Partition layout to accommodate the Ubuntu now (i presume i have done the right thing as thats how i usually do it). I will let my w7 reinstall go through, get drivers done and then turn my attention back to Ubuntu.

It is possible that the HDD was setup for RAID0 but not used due to a mobo error but the HDD has been working fine in windows.

[darkod]

Windows ignores the raid meta data but the ubuntu installer since 9.10 doesn't. I guess they wanted to protect you from using that disk if it really was in functioning raid array because you install raid another way.
I'm pretty sure that's your issue.

[Rnegade]

Windows ignores the raid meta data but the ubuntu installer since 9.10 doesn't. I guess they wanted to protect you from using that disk if it really was in functioning raid array because you install raid another way.
I'm pretty sure that's your issue.

Thanks, I will give that a try!

[Rnegade]

Bingo! Thanks! Now to work out how to let it use the 50gig partition as the install directory. I will boot back into windows and make sure that its setup correctly and then go back into Ubuntu and go from there.

Thanks.

[dino99]

mini howto: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9216264&postcount=14

[wilee-nilee]

Are you serious? w7 runs fine on that rig. Has been since the beta of w7. at 3.2GHz, 2gigram and a 9600GT this thing sings! This is a spare gaming rig and plays the games and runs the OS fine.

To clarify here your post was very confusing.
#1 you had a computer set up listed that was of no relevance, the one running W7
#2 You didn't understand some basic partitioning. Or what Ubuntu will install to, first you loaded ntfs, I said remove it leave a open space and you just loaded it with ext2.
Glad you got it all fixed. I think what we had here was a mix of not understand and a language barrier possibly.