Install won't find hard drives

[craesz]

other screen

[Old-Polack]

I'm running from that livecd right now.... thought about the PCC hardware listing.... I'm attaching those screens. The livecd finds the controller.... do I need to modify some of the settings? Why does it say IDE under the SATA controller? Maybe some setting on the drives (but then why does my prior install find them?)?

I see two possibilities, bad burn or bad read. If the burn checks out, the read lens may be dirty or misaligned. I'd go with dirty first.

Have you tried the disk in any other computer?

My last motherboard, had to have RAID turned on, AHCI turned on, then JBOD selected, in order to see individual SATA disks. I would suspect the BIOS settings, except the other installation is working with the current BIOS settings. This is why I'm thinking dirty lens or dying optical drive, if the disk itself checks out. I've personally never seen a properly burned disk have fdisk -l fail to see the drive partition tables when the proper modules are loaded. and they do seem to be loading in your tests. 

[Was_Just19]

I would change the (AHCI?) setting in BIOS and then see if it uses the sata_nv module, which I believe is the correct one for that board.

[Old-Polack]

I would change the (AHCI?) setting in BIOS and then see if it uses the sata_nv module, which I believe is the correct one for that board.

Reply #40 seems to do that.

[Was_Just19]

I would change the (AHCI?) setting in BIOS and then see if it uses the sata_nv module, which I believe is the correct one for that board.

Reply #40 seems to do that.

Yes for the module .....  not sure now about the BIOS settings though ....

[craesz]

I would change the (AHCI?) setting in BIOS and then see if it uses the sata_nv module, which I believe is the correct one for that board.

Change to AHCI or to SATA???

[craesz]

I see two possibilities, bad burn or bad read. If the burn checks out, the read lens may be dirty or misaligned. I'd go with dirty first.

Have you tried the disk in any other computer?

My last motherboard, had to have RAID turned on, AHCI turned on, then JBOD selected, in order to see individual SATA disks. I would suspect the BIOS settings, except the other installation is working with the current BIOS settings. This is why I'm thinking dirty lens or dying optical drive, if the disk itself checks out. I've personally never seen a properly burned disk have fdisk -l fail to see the drive partition tables when the proper modules are loaded. and they do seem to be loading in your tests.  

Tried booting from other CD drive in the same computer.... no go... same result. Just booted with the CD here at the house. No problems with the livecd seeing drives..... This is getting frustrating.

[vc]

Having a somewhat similar problem, I used modprobe to load the pata_amd and amd74xx modules, when my IDE drives weren't seen. Next fdisk -l command they were then present. The problem seems to be between hardware detection and choosing which controller modules to load. When the correct modules are loaded, the drives can be seen.

Interesting.  I've also encountered this problem recently, with four SATA drives attached to an Asus A8V-MX motherboard; performing the usual due diligence of a forum search lead me to this thread, where I've accordingly endeavoured to follow your advice above.  I found basically similar results; live CD boots successfully but the SATA drives are not 'seen' - however, none of the modprobe efforts were successful at all... modprobe -l | grep sata did return a list of SATA modules, yet inserting each in turn failed to produce any fdisk -l detection results.,

The reason I am posting in this thread now is because today I stumbled upon a possible solution:

http://mylinuxramblings.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/linux-hell-via-southbridge-vt8251-sata-ii-controller/

Rebooting, and passing the "pci=nomsi" boot parameter to the kernel via GRUB did produce immediate results - all four SATA drives were then detected, and I was able to partition and format them successfully.  As they seem to be alright now, I shall next attempt to continue with the install.

Regards, and good luck to all with motherboards having VT8251 southbridge chips!

[craesz]

Wish I had known this before I bought the new motherboard.....

[vc]

Wish I had known this before I bought the new motherboard.....

Yes... sorry about that; however, I've only encountered this now and was very lucky indeed to have actually found a functional workaround... or at least one that seems to be functioning so far (the system is updating from the heanet repo as I type this.).

If you have kept your previous motherboard, perhaps it may yet be of some use...?

[Was_Just19]

There is some interesting information supplied in this thread .....

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=120710

It does deal with older kernels but the info is interesting none the less.

[djohnston]

Thanks, JohnBoy. I didn't realize MSI had been around that long. I first ran into it on one of the PCs I bought from LinPC. I got lucky in configuring the BIOS, I guess.