Shuttle SX58H7 Pro: HDD and SDD not found

[janmartin]

Hi all,

I have a new Shuttle SX58H7 Pro and try to install Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS.

Problem is that at step 4 of 8 where one needs to create partitions nothing is displayed at all. The list is empty. Neither the SDD not the HDD are listed. I am stuck.

What to do?

Hardware list:
Intel Core i7 980 6x3,33GHz 12MB
16 GB Kingston HyperX 1600MHz (4x4GB), DDR3
SDD:Solid State Disk:120 GB OCZ Vertex3 SATA3
HDD: SATA 6Gb/s:500 GB SATA 6Gb/s Seagate Barracuda
22x DVD-Brenner Samsung SH-S223 SATA
NVIDIA geforce GTX 550Ti 1GB

[darkod]

Are the disks recognized in BIOS?
Also make sure the SATA mode is set to AHCI and on newer boards sometimes there is separate setting for the SATA3 ports, make sure this is AHCI too and enabled if they need to be enabled separately.

[janmartin]

I tried it with both IDE or AHCI settings in the BIOS, and it did not work at all!

Please find the output of

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo sfdisk -l
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ dmesg | grep sda
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ dmesg | grep sdb
Just to clarify: No output at all so far.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo lspci -v

output is a bit long, so I put it here:
http://bit.ly/wX9hSM

Screenshots (photos) of the BIOS:
http://bit.ly/yxQRNM

Any idea what's wrong?

Thanks.

[darkod]

Put it on AHCI, it should be AHCI.

Shut down the computer and try connecting the disks to different sata ports. Check that the cables are connected well.

In the list of the disks they are not shown, only the cd-rw is. The disks are not recognized.

[janmartin]

Darko,

I think you refer to this image:
http://bit.ly/xtoUas
Indeed the SDD and HDD are not shown.

However for booting they are listed:
http://bit.ly/xLi6vg
http://bit.ly/xuIcUx
http://bit.ly/xLvb7P

Not sure what to think of this.

I had a quick look, the HDD and SDD cables seem to be connected to the sockets labeled "2x SATA 3.0 (6Gbps)" at the top left hand side as shown here:
www.shuttle.eu/fileadmin/resources/download/docs/spec/barebones/SX58H7_Pro_e.pdf
(Last page.)

So what now?

[janmartin]

Just out of curiosity I burned iss to CDs and tried:
CentOS-6.2-x86_64-LiveCD.iso
Fedora-16-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso

They both get stuck during booting.

Ubuntu USB sticks still don't find no HDD or SDD:
ubuntu-10.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso
ubuntu-11.10-desktop-amd64.iso

Ideas please?

[darkod]

I know the sata3 ports are faster, but just as a test try them in the sata2 ports to see what happens.

[janmartin]

I am not a hardware guy at all, so changing is not an option unfortunately.

Shuttle support told the SATA 3 is controlled by ASM1061 and to check if it is supported by the OS.

I wonder how to do that?

[darkod]

Google doesn't show conclusive result whether it's supported or not.
One thing you could try, boot the cd in live mode and in terminal run:
lspci

Look carefully at the list of devices, look for SATA Controller, and see if the ASM1061 is reported. If it is, it should mean it's recognized. Note that you probably have two sata controllers, for sata2 and sata3.

[janmartin]

Darko,

already did:
sudo lspci -v
http://bit.ly/wX9hSM

It seems it is not listed.
So what to do?

[darkod]

I'm running out of ideas. I still think there is something in BIOS because on one picture with the list of IDE devices there are no disks recognized. Plus on that picture there are only 4 ports and 2 external, the board seems to have 6 ports, or not?

You might need to touch something in BIOS to activate this controller.

Did you assemble this computer? You said you are not a hardware guy. If you bought it, can you ask for suppost at the shop?

Let me look in the manual if it says something about the bios but I'm not sure it can help.

[darkod]

OK, the 6 ports are the total, 4 internal sata and 2 external sata.
The 4 internal are 2 x sata2 and 2 x sata3.

Even though it detects the disks at boot, not showing them in BIOS is your problem. But not sure how to solve it. You have to take a good look in the BIOS and check all the options about using the sata3 controller. If the disks are not shown in BIOS it's like they don't exist for the machine.

This is not a problem with ubuntu or a driver. You have to make them show up in bios.

[janmartin]

I set up my video camera to capture the screens flashing by when booting.

What puzzles me is that SDD and HDD are in fact listed once:

Transcript from screen #3:
Asmedia 2106 SATA/PATA Controller Ver 0.83
Using PCIE Gen 2
SATA Channel 0 OCZ-VERTEX3 SATA 3
SATA Channel 1 ST3500413AS SATA 3

So it seems the BIOS is aware of both drives?

But Ubuntu (and Debian, fedora and CentOS i tested) failed?
Ideas?

Frames:
http://bit.ly/yoGuii

http://bit.ly/yGY57J

http://bit.ly/wQ6Yb2

http://bit.ly/z6LMUE

http://bit.ly/xGJ0F8

http://bit.ly/wkO6K5

[darkod]

Not sure the Asmedia screen is part of bios or not. I understand that it detects the disks but that is still not proof bios works and communicates correctly with the Asmedia controller.

One thing is for sure, until you go into BIOS and see the disks listed there, they are not recognized.

Forget the screen showing them as detected. Why aren't they in the BIOS list?

You might have some type of setting you need to enable somewhere.

That's why I suggested temporarily moving them to the other sata2 ports. If they are detected in bios as I think they will be, that is telling you where the problem lies.

[cioma]

I'm pretty sure that connecting boot drives to SATA2 ports will solve the problem.

The thing is that Shuttle SX58H7 Pro is based on Intel X58 chipset (+ICH10R) with doesn't support SATA3 (it's SATA2 only). Instead, SATA3 support is implemented with a separate chip (Asmedia 2106 SATA/PATA Controller) which is connected over PCIe to the X58 chipset. So it's the same if you'd plugged in an add-on card with SATA3 controller into the PCIe slot. The problem is that either main BIOS, or bootloader (GRUB), or Linux kernel might have problems with booting from drives connected to this external (to chipset) controller.

This also explains why drives are not listed in BIOS setup - they are not supposed to. Asmedia 2106 has it's own firmware that is started after the main BIOS. By the way this firmware may have its own setup utility and to ender it you might need to press some key combination.

Well, in reality it's more complex than that but I simlify the description for the sake of clarity.