Hi, I am trying to install a linux distribution on my old Compaq Presario EA5335. So far I have been unsuccesful, because in every single distro I have tried my IDE hard drive (a Western Digital 200BB, 20GiB) could not be found by the partitioning program. I tried Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Arch linux, dsl, even NetBSD just to be sure, none of them worked. I have been told (in another forum) that it could be a problem with the IDE controller on my motherboard, but googling around didn't help me, so I am stuck.
No hd is recognised at all, the output of dmesg| grep hda or dmesg| grep sda is always empty...
Is anyone familiar with this issue? Any pointer welcome!
Thanks.

Is the hard drive detected in your bios setup? If not, the drive is probably dead. If it is detected, try running WD's hard drive diagnostic utilities on the drive in thorough mode just to eliminate any hardware problem with the drive:

http://support.wdc.com/product/downl...id=502&lang=en

If the drive passes, Then it might be a compatibility problem with the IDE controller as you mentioned or may be something in your bios settings. Just to be clear, you can boot the install cd or linux livecd, but no hard drives are found, correct? If that's the case, boot up any linux livecd and run:

$ lspci

That will list all the hardware on the pci bus which should include your IDE controller. Googling with that info should reveal if there is some issue with the controller.

You may want to double check your hard drive cabling and jumpering as well.

Can you see the hard drive in the BIOS setup?

Western Digital Hard drives also have funky jumper settings. Every other manufacturer has two jumper settings MASTER / SLAVE, but no, that's to simple WD MUST make things harder so they have 3 settings.

MASTER w/SLAVE preset
MASTER SINGLE
SLAVE


SO you have to make sure the jumper on the drive is in the correct position. If it is jumpered as MASTER w/SLAVE and there is no slave drive on the cable ti will NOT function properly.

I think your next step would be to verify the drive is jumpered properly for the number of devices on the cable.

The first time I installed windows 2000 I ran into this issue. The install would complete, the system would reboot and then blue screen with the 0x7b error which means inaccessable boot device. I spent an hour on the phone with tech support getting read to send the drive back when I noticed the extra jumper setting. Moved the jumper and the system booted perfectly. Grrrr

this has always been a pet peeve of mine with Western Digital. If I remove the slave drive from the PC I have to re-jumper the master, but you can't see which position the jumper needs to be in so you have to pull the WD drive out re-jumper it and then put it back in. Repeat if you add the slave drive back into the system. SOOOOOO Annoying.

Hope your issue is as simple as that to fix..

thank you all for your answers! I can see the drive from the bios, It is set as master, and the slave is the dvd drive... I have win XP running on that pc now, and it boots without issues, so I doubt there is a physical problem with the drive...

I appear to have solved the issue! I opened the case and took a look at the drive, removed the little white thing that I just discovered being the jumper, put it back together and rebooted, and now linux can see the drive... I just wrote this here for future reference, in case someone else has the same issue... I really have no idea of what happened, nor I know why it didn't work before, I just looked at the manual at WD website and followed the instructions to set the drive as master!

So my suspicions are confirmed.. Glad you got it worked out.