I have no hard disks - apparantly? [Solved]

[jaykar]

Having used Sabayon before and being tempted back by all the prettiness I downloaded the 3.4f X86_64 iso, the live cd environment loads just fine and I was yet again impressed by Sabayon.....

Until I tried to install it, the installer reports that it can not find any hard disks, which i found awfully odd since it's definitely there and Ubuntu finds it just fine.

Thinking perhaps this was a 64bit driver issue or some such I patiently download the x86 iso of 3.4f to try that. Unfortunately I was yet again greeted with dissappointment as the same problem arose.

Hardware:

Motherboard: Asus M2N-X
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
RAM: 2GB DDR2
Hard Disk: 1x Western Digital Cavier 160GB SATA
Graphics Card: Nvidia Geforce 8500GT
Optical Drive: Samsung SATA DVD-RW


Any thoughts anyone? I'd really like to be able to get Sabayon up and running, but if it's not going to be possible I will have to wait for Ubuntu 7.10

[DontPanic]

Are you dual-booting with Ubuntu?

[jaykar]

yes but I wasn't originally, i installed Ubuntu to make sure some form of Linux would work with it. It looks like a Kernel bug from a discussion i had with c0nv1ct earlier on IRC. i'm gonna try downloading 3.4e and see if it works with that unless i get a better option in the mean time.

[DontPanic]

When dual booting with boot loaders from other version of Linux, I sometimes run into a problem where SabayonLinux wants to look at everything as sda#, sdb#, etc..., but my other boot loader wants to refer to everything as hda#, hdb#, etc...

Then I usually get some sort of message indicating a valid boot device was not found, and it asks to enter a valid boot device.

Let me know if this sounds like your problem, and I can tell you some of my work-arounds.

[jaykar]

no the problem is a compatability issue between the kernel revision for 3.4f and my motherboard's SATA controller by the looks of it. When Sabayon boots (with or without Ubuntu on the HDD) i can read the dmesg and see it loading the sata controller and picking up the hard disks existence but then just not doing anything with it. i'm hoping that 3.4e won't have this issue with being on a different kernel revision.

[jaykar]

Still no luck 3.4e yielded exactly the same issue.

Just to clarify the problem is not boot loader related, as it doesn't actually get as far as even installing the boot loader.

When i start the Installer from the Live DVD I get as far as partitioning the hard disk, and it says there are no hard disks on the system.

DMESG shows ATA link on the SATA controller being brought up at ATA1(the hard disk) and ATA4(the optical drive) but no devices are actually presented.

Getting quite disheartened now.

[ajez]

probably its a kernel issue and a patch is needed. to let our devs patch it, u should open a bug report on our bugzilla giving them all infos possible. they'll try to fix for next sabayon release.
meantime u should try some boot cheat codes u find here: http://wiki.sabayonlinux.org/index.php? ... c_Hardware

i suggest trying noapic and/or acpi=off and/or all-generic-ide .. u can also try them combined writing them together separated by a space.
make some try, maybe u are lucky.

[jaykar]

The problem has been solved.

The motherboard BIOS contains 3 options for the SATA Controller mode. RAID, SATA and AHCI. I had it set to SATA and it wouldn't work, changing it to AHCI fixes the problem.

Please note though, if your dual booting with Windows, make sure you have the chipset drivers installed in Windows before changing this setting as Windows cannot operate AHCI mode controllers without the drivers.

[bigotto]

I'm trying to install sabayon 3.4f on asrock conroe xfire sata2 raid motrherboard,
but during partition phase, I got an error related to my striped disks (raid0)
and the drive does'nt result in the device list.

In bios settings i've specified "RAID".

you think that it's possible to reuse my exixting sata raid0 partion or i have to format it
and create a raid with linux raid software?