BIOS recognizes HD, but Ubuntu doesn't recognize it as partition

Question

I just stuck in a new 64 GB SSD (literally out of the box) into my Lenovo X61 laptop, replacing an old 5400 RPM 80 GB drive. When I boot the system, my motherboard successfully sees the SATA hard drive.

Now I want to install Ubuntu on it. I stick it in the CD drive, bootup the system, and it gets to step 4 (choose partition), but sees no available partitions. Do I need to do something to the hard drive before installing Ubuntu?

Many thanks.

Edit: Also, I just ran the hard disk drive diagnostics program that came with the BIOS, and it checked out 100% good. Not sure what to make of this.

Solution 1

Try running this from a terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gparted
sudo gparted

And here you can see whats happenin', create a new partition table if needed. Try creating the partitions here. (Yes, do this from the LiveCD)

Solution 2

I had the identical problem. Neither gparted nor fdisk showed the drive. I had to eventually do this:

Solution: I had to mess with integrated peripheral settings in BIOS. The mobo's default setting for all the sata ports including [drive in question] were IDE. Unfortunately this hard drive only works with RAID or AHCI (I opted for the latter). You have to go under integrated peripherals -> on chip settings -> And switch the [drive] from IDE (the default setting) to RAID or AHCI.

From here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1822085

Comments

[quack quixote]

the LiveCD should already have gparted available if you've booted into the LiveCD desktop environment. it's in the System -> Administration menu. gparted is not included in the default install, so in a fresh installation you will have to install it.

[Apache]

Sorry last time I couldn't find it, had to install it and it wasn't installed at all (9.10, 10.04) :/