I seem to have a very unusual problem with Linux. I have SuSE 9.3 Professional installed fine on my laptop's hard drive alongside Windows XP. The other day I tried booting up using a Linux LiveCD (Knoppix), and it wouldn't detect my hard drive. I then tried an Ubuntu livecd, same issue. The SuSE 9.3 Pro Livecd detected by hard drive correctly, but strangely enough SuSE 10.0 livecd did not...

I checked dmesg for any clues, and found that on my SuSE 9.3 installation, my hard drive was detected on scsi2 (there was nothing on scsi0 or scsi1). For every livecd, the boot would check scsi0 and scsi1, and then seemingly "quit" and move on. scsi2 was never checked it seems, as it is never mentioned.

My Hard Drive Controller is properly detected and uses sata_promise, this has been supported for more than a year by linux and is not an issue at all (the kernel versions on my livecds are up to date). My hard drive is an 80GB SAMSUNG MP0804H, and certainly not anything special or unique that linux would have problems with it.

Is there any way to force the checking of sata2 or something similar to solve this situation? I looked on Google and all I could find is a boot command to disable checking for sata.

Thanks,

hel

If you can, compare your Suse9.3 kernel config with newer livecd kernel-configs to see how they differ in sata controller and disk support and scsi driver support. Some kernels need option to scan all luns for sata cum scsi disks to be recognized correctly. You can check with each Distro how they support your Promise sata controller.
That is a common sata chip too. I have it but not all Linuxes recognize or boot the sata disk. Good luck.