Problem installing on computer with SATA-harddrive

Question

Today I wanted to install Ubuntu 11.04 on my fathers computer, as a dual boot next to Windows XP. It has two SATA HDDs in it. The motherboard is an Asus A8n-SLI SE.

The computer has two drives:

• SATA 1 (in bios) - 1TB, Windows XP installation.
• SATA 2 (in bios) - 150GB, empty, the plan is to install Ubuntu on this drive.

When starting the PC with the regular Ubuntu install CD, at the manual partitioning menu only the 1TB harddisk is shown. However, when running "sudo fdisk -l", or checking in GParted, the 150GB drive is shown like it should.

After this I tried uncoupling the 1TB disk. This doesn't help: now in the partitioning menu it doesn't show any hard disks at all.

I thought it maybe was some problem with the regular Ubuntu installer, so I downloaded and burned the Ubuntu 11.04 alternate installer. This however gives exactly the same problem: it doesn't show any hard disks (with only the 150GB disk plugged in). It gives one notice before the partitioning menu however: it says the installer found harddrive(s) with RAID-configuration and it asks if I want to enable those. It doesn't matter whether I choose "yes" or "no" - in both cases, no hard disk shows up in the partitioning menu. In the BIOS, any RAID-configuration is disabled, BTW.

I hope someone can help me with this problem, because I can't think of any next steps.

Thanks in advance!

Solution 1

It's quite likely that your HDD has leftovers of a RAID configuration, you can do something like this (on terminal)

sudo dmraid -rE

see some reference here

Solution 2

Have a look at your BIOS settings for your SATA drives.

Does it give you an option of setting "IDE Compatibility Mode"? If so try that.

You mentioned that there is no RAID - was there previously? Maybe try the accepted answer here to confirm.

Comments

[Admin]

I have the same issue with my WD 320 GB sata drive. I can install Ubuntu 10.10 and also Fedora 14 sees my HDD but not Ubuntu 11.04. It can be a bug in Ubunut 11.04. I appreciate if anybody can help me with this issue.