I was trying to install 10.3 on my system and have xp on it already. everything goes fine except suse says i dont have a hard disk to right onto its a western digital 500 g green power sata drive im so c onfused
Firstly, do you have a reason for installing 10.3?
11.0 would be better.
Are you using a Desktop, or Laptop?
Check your BIOS and make sure your SATA disks are set to IDE. My BIOS has another setting for hot-plugging SATA drives (AHCI), but it makes it difficult for other OS’s to see the drive.
It’s probably as the previous poster said, how your SATA controler is configured in the BIOS, however if you change it you have a good chance you run into boot issues with XP. I would give Suse 11 a try 1st without changing the bios and see how that goes.
(AHCI),
This setting should be changed in bios, in mine it goes to ‘compatibility’ .
Though for me, Suse had no problem with AHCI.
I had deleted my pre-installed Vista Crap to put on an equally crappy XP. It was XP that couldn’t read the drive.
I can tell you though Vista truly is a pain, esp when it come with whole heap of other pre-loaded junk. So it had to go. I had a valid copy of XP pro, so on it went. That’s on my New Thinkpad, not the box in my sig.
WELL i changed it to ahci ide raid and still nothing happened wont read my disk
Is there an option in the bios to set it to “SATA/RAID” or “SCSI”?
A fresh install of either XP or Vista would require you to supply the SATA drivers on either a floppy or CD. (By the way, the drive itself is irrelevant; what matters is the disk controller.)
Try this: At the installation boot menu in the box below type
pci=nomsi
If that doesn’t work, and I assume that Failsafe did not work, then report back the exact make and model of the machine. Along with that info, run msconfig in XP and find the scsi section under hardware - it may give you the disk controller. Or download/install the free SiSoft Sandra which gives even more data on the hardware. The controller is probably in the chipset, although if your machine is several years old it very well may be a separate physical device in the machine with its own controller. Again, msconfig will probably and Sandra definitely will tell you what it is.
Also, is it possible for you to get a Live-CD/DVD?