hard drive detection problem
 

I'm installing Suse 10.0 on my computer which has a Samsung SP2004c 200gb hard drive and the installation won't find it. Does anyone know what the problem is? It already has xp pro sp2 on the drive and i'm trying to create a dual boot system.

Do you mean that the **installer** cannot see the drive? Or--do you have SUSE running and you cannot see the drive from Linux.

If XP runs from that drive, then it is obviously healthy and any Linux installer should see it---and even offer to re-format it for you...;)

From within SUSE, you would first need to mount the drive.

Tell us more about overall configuration: total # and size of drives, what is installed and working and what has only been attempted.

Thats a sata drive correct?
Does SUSE 10.0 support sata drives to install to?
Does SUSE 10.0 support the sata controller?

If sata controller is compatible then maybe in the bios you can set the sata channel to pata or legacy IDE. See if you can install.

I did this once on and Fedora Core 3 install about a yeat ago. FC3 does not support sata on the install process, but does come with the module after it is installed. I ended up puttting in an IDE drive and installing FC3 to it. After install attached the sata drive and booted with Knoppix Live CD and used partimage to transfer the partitions from the IDE to SATA. Booted with a rescue CD and installed grub to the MBR.

Thats the only way I got it to install.
Brian1

I have 1 drive and thats the samsung with 200 GB. I meant that the installer couldn't see the drive. also the drive is a sata drive. i've tried various driver modules but none so far have worked.

Appears SUSe 10 can use sata but if the motherboard bios has the feature to set the sata to pio mode. http://kerneltrap.org/node/2173

Need more info what is the model of the sata controller?
Not all sata controllers have linux support.

Try booting from a Ubuntu Live CD or Knoppix Live CD, latest versions. From that run the command ' lspci ' to see what hardware it has.

Brian1

Just a quick note that the only Knppix i had was an old one and i have dialup so downloading a new one is out of the option, but i did notice that when i ran it it had no problems finding my hard drive.

Ive got an asus P5SD2-X mother board and when i looked on the driver cd for it it had linux drivers for the Sata, but they're uncompiled . So it is linux compatible. Can I somhow load those as modules into the install?