Ubuntu doesn't show hard drive when installing

[joshj70]

I have a 250gb SATA drive that I am trying to dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows. Windows is installed and works fine, but when I load up my live disk from my jump drive and I try to install it doesn't list anything in the partition table. I can mount and access the hard drive and I can manipulate it with GParted but no matter what I do it doesn't show up when installing. Any ideas?

[fantab]

I have a 250gb SATA drive that I am trying to dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows. Windows is installed and works fine, but when I load up my live disk from my jump drive and I try to install it doesn't list anything in the partition table. I can mount and access the hard drive and I can manipulate it with GParted but no matter what I do it doesn't show up when installing. Any ideas?

Post the screen shot of your HDD partitions taken from windows, without this information it will be only guess work on our part.

[joshj70]

Here is the partition table from Windows and info from fdisk.

[oldfred]

You are showing your Windows partition sda1 & unallocated. Have you tried creating partitions in advance & using manual install/Something Else to use the partitions. You should be able to create the partitions from the installer, but I always create in advance.

Install 11.10 with screenshots of Unity, gnome3, & gnome fallback - Not everything is necessary, but shows how to do many things
http://debianhelp.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/to-do-list-after-installing-ubuntu-11-10-aka-oneiric-ocelot/
Install 11.04
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installing
Ubuntu Install steps - then choose guide, close to what you want.
http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/index.html
Installs with good screenshots/examples:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~herman546/p22.html
Install with separate /home from aysiu
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installseparatehome

For the Total space you want for Ubuntu:
Ubuntu's standard install is just / (root) & swap, but it is better to add another partition for /home:
1. 10-25 GB Mountpoint / primary or logical beginning ext4(or ext3)
2. all but 2 GB Mountpoint /home logical beginning ext4(or ext3)
3. 2 GB Mountpoint swap logical

Depending on how much memory you have you may not absolutely need swap but having some is still recommended. I do not hibernate (boots fast enough for me) but if hibernating then you need swap equal to RAM in GiB not GB. And if dual booting with windows a shared NTFS partition is also recommended. But you usually cannot create that as part of the install, just leave some space. Or partition in advance (recommended).
One advantage of partitioning in advance is that the installer will use the swap space to speed up the install. Thanks Herman for the tip.

[joshj70]

I have tried making manual partitions, also I am trying to install 10.04, sorry I didn't mention that before. But no matter what the partitions are it never shows them in the install, it's always empty.

[oldfred]

Try running chkdsk with a Windows repairCD on the NTFS partition.

Once I had a working XP in sda and was installing in sdc. Gparted would take forever and never show sda. I then ran chkdsk on the Windows NTFS partitions and gparted then saw sda immediately. XP also booted slightly faster, but it still booted 2 or 3 times longer than Ubuntu.

Also was drive ever part of a RAID configuration or have you used the RAID setting in BIOS? If so meta data remains on drive that can interfer with installing. That also can be removed.

Presence1960 on remove old raid setting from HD
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1325650
sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sda
sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sdb
Also check BIOS for raid settings
More discusion:
http://wwww.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9274738#post9274738

[james2b]

There is a tool to re-build the drive partition table which is not to hard to use found here; http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk ,and is also on this disk; http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

[joshj70]

I took it out of a old server I had that used RAID, I will try to remove the meta data as you suggested and let you know what happens.

[joshj70]

The command you posted kept giving me errors, but I did some more research and I found a code that worked,

dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M seek=150000 skip=150000 of=/dev/sda

@james2b My friend has a crashed Linux partition so I will try those programs with it.

I am installing Ubuntu right now, thank you for the help, it's greatly appreciated.

[darkod]

Just for reference, you just needed to remove the raid meta data, with the command oldfred gave:
sudo dmraid -E -r /dev/sda

The installer ignores disks with raid meta data expecting you to run raid if you have meta data on the disk.