Re: No Hard Drive Found

From: David Wright (david_c_wright_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/12/04 

Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 09:18:08 +0200

George Peatty wrote:

> Trying to install Suse 8.2 on a machine that already has XP home. The
> hardware
> diagnostic craps out when it gets to the hard drive. It says it can't
> generate
> a partition recommendation and I'll have to enter one by hand. I have a
> Suse 8.2 evaluation CD that I tried to boot, and it said, similarly, that
> configuration information would not be stored because a hard drive was not
> detected. I ask you to believe that a hard drive exists, with a working
> copy of XP home thereon.
>
> When running XP Scandisk and Norton Disk Doctor I got some file allocation
> errors, and after several hours work succeeded in repairing those.
> (REpair is
> not easy when you can't directly access the hard drive) The problem
> persists even after running both NDD and Scandisk show no errors on the
> hard drive. Windows Device Manager shows no errors on the drive.
>
> I have never tried (till now) installing Suse 8.2 on this machine, but I
> had booted the evaluation CD on earlier occasions, and those configuration
> files
> were successfully written to disk. If the hard drive checks out in NDD, I
> have
> to wonder why Suse 8.2 will not install. My problem is not with the
> installation CDs, because they worked fine when I put Suse 8.2 on another
> box.
>
> Any thoughts? All help appreciated. TIA.

What spec machine, what disk controller do you have? Sounds like the
controller might not be recognised. I had the problem the other way round
with my new machine, 9.1 installed fine, but Windows XP couldn't find a
valid device to install on. In the end I had to download the controller
drivers and load them from floppy before it could recognise the Promise
SATA controller.

Maybe it is something similar. Please list your hardware.

Dave

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