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Old 05-31-2010, 07:05 PM   #1
hjthal1
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Registered: May 2010
Location: Lancaster, PA, USA
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Can't find hard drives, system runs slow


So I finally got the courage to switch from Vista to Linux (Mint), played with it from LiveCD for a while, liked it on a Dell with an Athlon X2. Tried it from LiveCD on my older Athlon 64 3200+ with 2 GB RAM. Ran choppy, but forums said I should install it on my hard drive. So I did.
Installed it on a 37GB 10K drive. Computer also has internal 320 and 640 drives and a 320 USB external. Now my computer can't see any of this, and the system still runs slow and choppy. What am I doing wrong? I can't see any of the other drives, so I can't download anything. I'm afraid of using up my 37 GB drive. Where are my hard drives? I can see them in CMOS, but not in Linux.
Help. My Windows is gone, and I'm afraid I f****d up.
 
Old 05-31-2010, 07:31 PM   #2
Person_1873
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get to the comand line and type
Code:
ls /dev
and post the results here

edit: to get to the command line hit alt+f2 and type gnome-terminal

Last edited by Person_1873; 05-31-2010 at 07:33 PM.
 
Old 05-31-2010, 07:37 PM   #3
syg00
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better for (just) hard drives would be (from a terminal)
Code:
sudo fdisk -l
(that's a lower case ell)
 
Old 05-31-2010, 07:42 PM   #4
JoshyJ
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Did you remove the LiveCD? Sounds stupid but everyone has done it.
 
Old 06-01-2010, 02:02 PM   #5
hjthal1
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So apparently the problem is worse than I thought. Yes, I did remove the LiveCD. I ran the installation just as suggested, accepting all the defaults except boot next to Windows, and selected erase the drive and install Linux fresh. I did select the right hard drive. The installation went perfectly. It told me to remove the CD (which I did), and then rebooted itself. The computer ran through the diagnostics and then stopped at
"Verifying DMI Pool Data .......................
Boot from CD ..."
and sat there for more than 12 hours. In fact, it's still there, a day later. There's no CD in the drive, but the computer wants me to boot from the CD.
I did at one point put the CD back in and booted up from it. It installed (apparently) the LiveCD version, which may be why I can't see hard drives.
But then I removed the CD, the opsys still worked (very, very slowly and choppy--I just don't understand this).
When I rebooted, it cycled back to\
"Verifying DMI Pool Data .......................
Boot from CD"
And is still there.
What's going wrong?
 
Old 06-02-2010, 07:15 PM   #6
Person_1873
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it sounds as though yur problem isnt infact with linux, but your motherboard and your bios, are you running your HDD's and your CD-Drive on different busses, e.g, the HDD's are sata and the cd-drive is pata/ide?
 
Old 06-02-2010, 07:34 PM   #7
Bratmon
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hjthal1 View Post
So apparently the problem is worse than I thought. Yes, I did remove the LiveCD. I ran the installation just as suggested, accepting all the defaults except boot next to Windows, and selected erase the drive and install Linux fresh. I did select the right hard drive. The installation went perfectly. It told me to remove the CD (which I did), and then rebooted itself. The computer ran through the diagnostics and then stopped at
"Verifying DMI Pool Data .......................
Boot from CD ..."
and sat there for more than 12 hours. In fact, it's still there, a day later. There's no CD in the drive, but the computer wants me to boot from the CD.
I did at one point put the CD back in and booted up from it. It installed (apparently) the LiveCD version, which may be why I can't see hard drives.
But then I removed the CD, the opsys still worked (very, very slowly and choppy--I just don't understand this).
When I rebooted, it cycled back to\
"Verifying DMI Pool Data .......................
Boot from CD"
And is still there.
What's going wrong?
Try changing the BIOS order so CD is NOT in it.
 
Old 06-02-2010, 07:35 PM   #8
syg00
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Run the liveCD and do the "sudo fdisk -l" from a terminal there. Also download this script and run it from the liveCD - post the RESULTS.txt it creates. That will show us what is trying to boot - or not. Comments in the script tell you how to run it.
 
Old 06-03-2010, 08:02 AM   #9
hjthal1
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Registered: May 2010
Location: Lancaster, PA, USA
Distribution: Mint 9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Person_1873 View Post
it sounds as though yur problem isnt infact with linux, but your motherboard and your bios, are you running your HDD's and your CD-Drive on different busses, e.g, the HDD's are sata and the cd-drive is pata/ide?
Person, thanks, you are correct about the buss setup. But why should that make a difference if I installed it correctly?
 
Old 06-03-2010, 10:16 AM   #10
Person_1873
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it can become an issue if one of your busses has failed, i once had the IDE bus fail and i've seen many sata busses fail on nvidia chipsets
 
Old 06-04-2010, 10:44 AM   #11
hjthal1
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Registered: May 2010
Location: Lancaster, PA, USA
Distribution: Mint 9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Person_1873 View Post
it can become an issue if one of your busses has failed, i once had the IDE bus fail and i've seen many sata busses fail on nvidia chipsets
I was able to get it booted up, it runs, and it found all my drives, but my gosh but it runs slowly...almost two seconds after I click any thing before I get any response. And on a 10K hard drive! Clearly I am doing something wrong. But I thought this system was supposed to be fast. This is slower than when I ran it off a flash drive or the LiveCD.
 
Old 06-06-2010, 02:36 AM   #12
Person_1873
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try turning compiz off, to do that you need to open the control center, find the appearance settings and choose the desktop effects tab, choose none
 
  


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