8.04 Doesn't detect drives...

[szemen]

hi! I've finally TRIED to make a jump to Linux...lots of hurdles along the way :P

First was a ata3.01 error, got around that by booting from USB. Now another problem. It now boots, but when I try to install, it only detects the USB drives, but not the 2 other hard drives I have on there....

My rig is a Shuttle SP35P2, with E6400 and 2G G.Skill HKs, 8800GTS and WD 320Gb and Samsung 80Gb.

[djchandler]

I'm having the same problem getting my blank 160gb WD HD recognized. I suspect it's chipset related (nforce 3), although I can't imagine why.

I've duplicated the problem using the 64-bit Live CD, the alternate 64-bit install CD, and the alternate x386 install CD, so it's a general problem. I created a bug report on launchpad earlier today. This is odd, because this drive had no problems when I upgraded from 7.10, but a motherboard swap created the opportunity fro a fresh install, so I backed up and started a fresh install on a blank HD.

I see you have the same problem with an Intel chipset. Maybe it's the WD hard drives. Is your drive eIDE or SATA, and is the WD the master?

I've been using Linux for 5 years and ubuntu for almost 2. This has me flummoxed. Funny thing is, 6.06, 7.04 and 7.10, all 32-bit versions, installed fine on this drive, but with a different motherboard. The other odd thing is the Debian Etch 64-bit installer has zero problems with this configuration. It has to be an Ubuntu problem. I had no problems getting the Western Digital Tools CD (Caldera DOS) to work either.

[djchandler]

I'm giving up for now and installing Debian Etch 64-bit. Everything working so far. I may try an Ubuntu partition once I get Debian Etch running. But maybe not. If not, I hope somebody else can help. You can leave me a personal message if you want. I've also subscribed to this thread, so I'll be alerted to any future posts.

Good luck!

[szemen]

also posted on OCAU.com.au, seems like we're not the only people with this problem. Has this only happened to you with 8.04?

[djchandler]

also posted on OCAU.com.au, seems like we're not the only people with this problem. Has this only happened to you with 8.04?

As far as I know, this only happens with 8.04, both in the 64-bit and the 386 versions, alternate and Live CDs. One of the weird things I noticed was repeated attempts to access the floppy before failure to find the hard drive. The alternate CD asked for a driver disk too. Selecting generic IDE didn't work. My workaround was to re-install Gutsy from the alternate install CD, then upgrade from the Hardy alternate install CD.

None of the 4 different Hardy CDs I tried detected my hard drive. It's a Western Digital 160gb eIDE. The motherboard (ASRock K8upgrade-NF3) supports SATA (nForce 3-250), but I don't have a spare SATA drive. I turned off the SATA in BIOS (AMI). I am suspicious of the BIOS, but mostly because it's so slow to boot.

AMI apparently takes a long time to boot. The motherboard I replaced had an AMI BIOS too, but with a VIA chipset, and it took a long time to boot. It was replaced because of a bad DIMM slot, and there are only two to start with. I was reluctant to try a higher density DIMM under the circumstances.

Launchpad seems to have lost my bug report. There's no resolution and I can't find it.

Maybe it's just my motherboard. But it's obviously entirely different from yours. It's a mystery I don't want to try to solve. At least I came up with a workaround. I don't/won't code anymore.

[djchandler]

EDITORIAL

Now I've had it! Either Ubuntu is done with me or vice-versa.

I re-installed from my Gutsy alternate, updated from the Hardy alternate. All went well seemingly. At the end of the update, I was prompted to delete some (supposedly) obsolete packages. I've done this before without qualms or mishap with Ubuntu. But down in that list is a package called HALD, the Hardware Abstraction Layer Daemon. When I tried to re-boot, lo and behold, the startup hung, right after informing me (the second try) from recovery mode that my primary IDE port was too slow, and even though the system had previously been reading from the disk, determined I had no boot hard disk.

This has to be a huge bug. It's been reported on Launchpad, but it feels like I'm getting ignored. I can't find the bug report, and there's been no further posts in the thread.

Anyway, I tried rebooting a third time into Hardy by selecting an older kernel and using recovery mode. All seemed to be going okay until xserver started. After being prompted to let the xorg.conf file get rebuilt, I got to the login. The desktop appeared only to have x start over again. Mind you this is with the open source nv driver, not the proprietary nvidia driver. So I logged in again. The next thing I know, gnome services and applets are crashing one after the other. When update-manager and synaptic crashed sequentially, I tried to shut down. Of course the system froze before everything could be halted and/or killed.

Right now I'm running Debian Etch on the same computer. DBAN took care of Hardy. There hasn't been a whimper since I got it back up last night, even with a Folding@Home client running in the background while I'm adding packages and tweaking things to my liking.

What is Canonical's business plan is for the future? Do they intend to stop supporting some hardware without informing their users? This desktop computer has: Athlon 64 2800+ cpu, 1 gb RAM, NForce3-250 chipset, WD 160 gb IDE UDMA-133 hard drive, GeForce FX 5500 256mb discrete graphics card, 450w PS. I know it's not current, but it's been adjudged worthy of a Vista upgrade (rofl, like that will ever happen). It's at least middle of the road if not a performance beast.

So I'm off Ubuntu. Lenny and Sid, future Debian releases on which Ubuntu is based, are considered testing and unstable respectively, apparently for very good reason. It's Debian for the future. If that's Shuttleworth's plan, it's working.

[djchandler]

Pulled the WD eIDE 160 gb hard disk. I'm not sure what was going on, but Hardy (AMD64) is now running great on a WD SATA 250 gb, same motherboard. It boots so fast now I can hardly see the BIOS sign-on and GRUB boot message. I'll have to be quick if I want to get to the GRUB menu now.

When I finally got things running, I noticed that hald (hardware abstraction layer daemon) was included in the first batch of system updates I downloaded.

So I'm NOT done with Ubuntu. Good thing. I didn't want to fool with the nsplugin wrapper for Firefox in Debian Etch or Lenny. Ubuntu makes it much easier.


:guitar:

[Black_Diamond]

I also have a Shuttle, but it's a G5. It didn't detect the hard drive either.

I also tried Fedora Core 9, and it had the same problem. Windows finds the hard drives just fine. The error message on Fedora Core 9 was a little more informative. It showed an error message, which was something about 19h and using irqpoll when booting. The irqpoll option doesn't work!

I fiddled with the BIOS settings, and that seems to have fixed my problem. There were several options that I changed, but essentially I changed the SATA drive and I think a CPU setting to use the older non-native settings. Some of the settings stated that they were fine for Windows XP and Windows Vista, but they weren't okay for Windows 2000. Sorry I can't be more specific, but other people may want to check their BIOS settings.

[djchandler]

We talked about this topic at the local LUG meeting here in Kansas City this week. (http://www.kclug.org/) It's an informal and interesting bunch of people running several different linux distros, but we all have at least one thing in common. We're committed to FOSS.

I mentioned that hald was considered an expendable package after upgrading from Gutsy to Hardy, only to be included in the first system update I was able to perform after getting up and running on the "new" hard drive. Nearly everyone in the room was shocked. "That's a pretty important piece of software," quipped one of the members.

In Debian, there's a package called "discover" that is described as a "hardware identification system." It is thusly described by Ubuntu's repository database.

Discover is a hardware identification system based on the libdiscover1 library. Discover provides a flexible interface that programs can use to report a wide range of information about the hardware that is installed on a Linux system. It functions at boot-time by probing the available system busses and loading the appropriate drivers based on data provided in the discover1-data package.This package has been part of Debian since Sarge, previous version to the current stable release, Etch. At this time, it appears that discover is not a part of the default Ubuntu install. Should it be?

This situation raises even more questions. Is the hardware abstraction layer daemon (hald) something we're trying to evolve away from? My impression is some (developers) wish to squeeze as much performance as possible from hardware. Is it to be at the expense of stability and/or compatibility? In our zeal to make use of multi-core cpus, terabyte sized hard drives and new graphics hardware, are we going to force some (old) users to choose a different distro or buy new hardware? In our quest to look "cool" with "wow" features, do we give up functionality? Most of us are not Apple users, and most of us don't want an(other) Apple. So are we instead going down a parallel path to Microsoft's DirectX? Do we want Ubuntu to be the "Vista" of Linux distros? Hopefully the answer to at least the last question is a resounding "no!"

I have LOTS of questions. Anybody have answers?

:guitar:

[nlangmaid]

First was a ata3.01 error, got around that by booting from USB. Now another problem. It now boots, but when I try to install, it only detects the USB drives, but not the 2 other hard drives I have on there....

My rig is a Shuttle SP35P2, with E6400 and 2G G.Skill HKs, 8800GTS and WD 320Gb and Samsung 80Gb.

I have a Shuttle SP35P2 too and hit essentially the same problem. The trick was to go into the BIOS settings and change the disk to legacy mode. The BIOS help says something about older operating systems not recognising the native mode, and evidently Hardy Heron is an "older operating system".

This is pretty common with Linux - works great on older hardware, sometimes a bit of a pain to get running on very new equipment.

Hope this helps.

Nick.

[JAMOS123]

Check if your hardr drive shows up in setup.
If not check the IDE cables inside your computer and the power cords

[JAMOS123]

Also if nothing happens go into setup and change the boot sequence.


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Never put your floppy as the first boot option- JAMOS