no disk to install on

[DD]

I'm a newbie to the linux world I heared some good stories about it so I wanted to give it a try.
I downloaded the 9.04 kubuntu iso and grabbed an old desktop (amd thunderbird 2gig 512mb ram and 80gig hdd) to install it on.

The installation gave no problems and soon I was able to take my first baby steps into the linux world. The only problem I had was no wireless connection. After some googling i found out that my sitecom usb wireless adapter with Ralink 2870 chipset needed some work and was nog plug and play.
I tried to folow the tutorials on the forums but I could not get it to work and I found a note that this issue was solved in 9.10 soon to be released.

When 9.10 was released I downloaded the iso and tried to install it. But the installer stopped at the point where you create your partitions. There was no disk availeable. After retrying several times I downloaded the update ISO and did a succesfull update from 9.04 to 9.10 just to find out that the wireless isue was still there.

My first thought was that by updating the system maybe did try to use some of the old drivers i tried on the 9.04 system. So I grabbed the 9.10 cd again (not update) and started the installation all over to be sure i got a clean install. But again no harddisk found by the installation manager.

I booted the pc with a windows live cd (bartpe) and formatted the drive with partition magic to an EXT3 filesystem and tried again. No luck. Even formatting to NTFS gets me no harddisk.
But when I put in the 9.04 cd it finds a harddisk and is able to install.

I tried to download the iso again, checked the cd for errors, tried the update cd, switched to master, slave, raid controller on/off. I'm getting pretty frustrated now I'm not a quitter but this have costed me 2 days allready.

so please tell me what I did wrong and how to do a clean install with only 9.10 on the drive.

[dibl]

Re: no disk to install on

Once in awhile this kind of problem happens:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3093670.0

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3082940.0

but not often enough to really see a trend or a typical reason.

Try going into the BIOS and look at the IDE channel (I assume that is an IDE/PATA drive). Does it have "mode" settings? If so, try another mode.

Also, on the off chance that there's some problem with the partition table, you could boot a Parted Magic or GParted Live CD and do Device > New Partition Table and choose MS-DOS for the type of table (that is the default). Then proceed to make your ext3 or ext4 partitions -- don't forget to make a 1G partition for swap.

Last idea -- (a) make a new Kubuntu Live CD in case there's a defect or bad burn problem, or (b) make an Alternate Install CD and see if it likes the hard drive better.

Good luck!

[DD]

Re: no disk to install on

thanx,

i will try the live cd gpared thing.

I tried a new live cd, downloaded the update iso but still nog luck.

[DD]

Re: no disk to install on

today I installed gparted on the 9.10 live cd. and it reconized my harddrive. I changed some settings, created new partitions etc etc but still no can do when running the installation.

I looked in the bios for an option to change the IDE mode but there isn't any.

I formatted the partition back to ntfs and tried to boot from a windows xp cd, choose the repair option and fixed the MBR so grub was no longer there.
But all this effort still no luck on installing 9.10 from the cd.

I tried a different harddisk but it gave me the same options, no harddisk.

I put the 9.04 cd back in and it is just finished installing kubuntu.
I think I will try to update this install to the 9.10 version and hope that I never need to do a clean install from the 9.10.

[dibl]

Re: no disk to install on

It's hard to say exactly why such oddities occur sometimes. There may be some tweak to the PATA driver on the kernel in the 9.10 Live CD that is incompatible with the IDE controller on your motherboard or hdd, or with your BIOS version. Although one would assume that IDE/PATA drives will be around for some years to come, they are basically gone from new computers, and fading quickly from the distribution channels. Newegg shows a grand total of 9 IDE/PATA models available at this time, compared to 58 models of SATA hdds for internal desktop drives.