SUSE 11.0 hard drive detection problems

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

ok heres the thing

i downloaded the suse 64 bit dvd and tried to install it but it cannot pick up my hard drive on setup

i know its not the computers fault because i had ubuntu and redhat enterprise linux 5 running on it just fine

im thinking that its a kernel problem because ive had similar results with the newer kernels

is there any way i can force the installation to recognize my hard drive or disable anything b4 installation, any help would be much appreciated

heres my rig::
AMD x2 4200+
abit AN52 ATX mobo nForce520 chipset
1 gb pc5300
Disk Drive ST3320620AS (320 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA-II)
nvidia 7600GT

#2

Can you please boot to another (Linux or LiveCD) OS and post the output of lspci -v and lspci -n.

#3

I’ve had what sounds like the exact same problem - I’m not able to boot to any version of the kernel after roughly 2.6.22.x. From what I can piece together from problems other people have been having I think it is related to AHCI and the nforce chipset causing an interrupt conflict - here’s a thread about it

Unable to boot from CD with AHCI enabled - Ubuntu Forums

From what I’ve been reading you either need to pass the “pci=nomsi” argument to the kernel (which didn’t seem to have any effect when I tried it) or disable AHCI altogether in the BIOS which would seem to be the right option, AHCI also causes a lot of problems with hard disk detection in windows vista. I tried passing “hwprobe=-modules.pata” too because that seemed to be suggested in most of the threads I’ve seen about this on forums without any explanation for what it acutally does.

Turning off AHCI is a problem because it’s not mentioned in any menus on the Phoenix bios that’s on my Abit AN52 motherboard. I can’t find any firmware updates for it either. Then I found this thread:

Universal abit USA Forums - View Single Post - AN52 sata_ide deviceID (No AHCI)

Where they say that the an52 doesn’t acutally support AHCI at all.

I’d really appreciate if someone could help here I really don’t know how to get this working.

#4

that could explain the problem…

So the linux kernel is trying to load a vanilla nforce 520 mcp65 driver for the controller, which doesn’t work since that driver will try to use AHCI? Is there a way to explicity disable AHCI probing as a kernel parameter?

#5

i have a somewhat diff twist on this problem - on a clean installation of suse11 on an abit va-20 with western digital eide drive, the install detected the drive a /dev/sda rather than /hda.
it works ok, and even fdisk -l thnks it’s sda:

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000152e8

here’s an excerpt from lspci:

lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8378 [KM400/A] Chipset Host Bridge
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge
00:08.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c475 (rev 81)
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: ADMtek NC100 Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100 (rev 11)
00:0a.0 Mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc. 20269 (rev 02)
00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)

no problems with previous 10.0,1 and 2.

any thoughts?

#6

Ok, I finally got my installation working - the problem was actually that I was using a CD-RW as the boot cd, which causes problems when mounting - watch out for that one! A very confusing and frustrating problem. I still had to use the pci=nomsi kernel argument but everything went swimmingly after that :slight_smile:

wmmSuse your problem isn’t actually a problem at all - the ‘hdX’ device naming convention was changed - now all hard disks are given /dev/sdX names. The convention is to label ide devices first so it goes like:

sda = hda
sdb = hdb
sdc = hdc
sdd = hdd

and then if you have a SATA channel they are labeled from there. If there is no IDE channel as will happen in future they are just named normally.