Hello, I am a new comer to the community and the linux world in general and I would like to say hello to everyone, and good day!

A little background on my situation:
I have a Asus u46e-bal5 laptop and I was using ubuntu on virtual box for a little while, but there are limitations, so I decided I wanted to run a linux distro alongside my windows 7(In this case Fedora 15). So I booted from the live-cd and tried to install..long story short, I mistakenly wiped out my windows 7 operating system, BIG MISTAKE.

I was able to get win 7 back, but then I decided after trying Fedora 15 out that I would give it its own hard drive instead partitioning the one with windows 7 on it.

I got a completely unused seagate momentus 5400.6 320 gb hard drive and replaced the windows 7 hard drive with it in my laptop.

Now when I run the Fedora 15 installer anaconda and I get to the part where its detecting storage devices, it always says "No usable disks have been found". And I have tried both "Basic storage devices" as well as "Specialized storage devices" for the "type of device the installation will involve", but neither works. Its weird bc when I go the specialized storage devices" route it lets me check off which partitions I want to use and then when I click next it says "No usable disks have been found".

I've read a few things about linux and seagate drives and such, but I don't really understand why anaconda can't detect it. It installed just fine (so to speak) on the hard drive with the windows 7 on it initially, so is this some limitation of seagate drives? I tried changing the drive to IDE in the bios and still no dice. The hard disk should be formatted, whats wrong?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

This may sound stupid since I'm not as computer savy as I'd like to be, but does this have anything to do with the file system the drive is using? I'm not sure what it is, and don't really know how to check(if it was windows I know i could check in the operation system itself) but i read somewhere that only certain file systems will be detected. If so, is there any way I can change this in Fedora before installation using terminal? idk

Might be time to think about using a virtual machine instead. It is the most safe way I know of to run OS's. A pretty new system runs them just fine.

Might be the time to read the OP's posts before posting. He had already a VM, but wants to have a native install

@Prodogy11: No, the installer should detect the disk regardless of the file system. Please boot into the Live-system and post the output of (lower case L, not the number 1).

okay, be right back

almost all new drives are pre formatted to NTFS
( a big pain in the "you know what" )

the fedora installed will be able to reformat it to ext4

now on the other hand
your system might be auto seeing the second drive as a RAID ( bios setting)


TobiSGD command will help us help you


You also have to decide on HOW you are going to dual boot
with win7 on it's OWN drive set the second drive ( fedora) as the bootable one and install grub toi THAT mbr

DO NOT overwrite win7's bootloader
fedora should auto see win7 and set up grub to boot it

Only true for external drives, internal harddisks usually don't have any partitions on them.

Actually, I am wondering why the people that respond to this thread are not reading the posts of the OP. The OP clearly stated that this is a laptop (rarely with more than one harddisk) where he replaced the disk with Windows on it with a brand new disk that will be dedicated totally to Linux.
So, there is no second disk, no dual-boot and no problems with different bootloaders.

Oh gee TobiSGD , your highness. I must have missed this in his original post.

"Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!"


The problems he had on the virtual machine were never explored.

I apologize if I was rude, wasn't my intention.
But nonetheless, in the last weeks I have seen more and more posts from members that seem to read only the title of a thread and the first few words of the first post and then come with a standard reply that doesn't fit to the questions. Your post (and the one from JohnVV) just were the ones that pulled my switched for rant-mode.

The OP didn't say that were problems with the VM, but that a VM has limitations, which is totally true. Therefor he wanted to try a native install.

Thank you very much for being more of an adult than I was. My widdo fweelings were hurt.

You are correct in that it may never run a virtual machine and that a dual boot is the best choice for him and the system. I just get so many of these "borked my install what do I do" sort of questions.

For the OP.

Did the drive show correctly in bios after you changed it? I know you said you change the access type but did you see the drive correctly as a drive? Some bios's have a utility to run that populates the bios. Might be called something like drive detect or such.

For TobiSGD, is it possible that Fedora doesn't have the sata drivers for his board?

Sorry for the wait.

When I type sudo fdisk -l into terminal it says

liveuser is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

Did I do something wrong?

so I typed in su - then your command and I get the output below:
Disk /dev/mapper/live-rw: 4294 MB, 4294967296 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 522 cylinders, total 8388608 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/mapper/live-rw doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/mapper/live-osimg-min: 4294 MB, 4294967296 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 522 cylinders, total 8388608 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/mapper/live-osimg-min doesn't contain a valid partition table
[root@localhost ~]#

What does this tell you?

It says you booted from a live cd.

I'd go back to bios. We need to start all over.

This is a new drive. It should not matter to the OS. A modern drive ought to have a chip burned on it that reports what it is. That info can be used later either buy os or bios or both. What does bios say?

The command fdisk with the ell -l option ought to produce an output more like this. But this assumes some stuff that you may not have yet.

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000f1a3e
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 12749 102400000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 12750 24906 97651102+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 24907 25149 1951897+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 25150 60802 286375936 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 25150 60802 286374912 7 HPFS/NTFS



Guess you could use parted, that too may fail since we don't know the state of this drive. Might be worth it to use some hard drive diag.


http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-v...-fdisk-parted/

Hello again jefro, and thanks for your help again..

So i tried the other command you suggested. Command and output below:

sudo parted /dev/mapper/live-rw print
Model: Linux device-mapper (snapshot) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/live-rw: 4295MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop

Number Start End Size File system Flags
1 0.00B 4295MB 4295MB ext4


When I go into bios, it doesn't allow me to boot from anything other than the cd, i.e. the dvd drive is the only boot option. Does that mean theres something wrong with the hard disk? I also tried to boot from the disk using it as an external hardrive and it still doesn't show in the bios. I'm not sure if thats normal for an unused disk or not.

Fro your posts, it seems to me that you may not have correctly installed your new drive in the laptop. Try removing and replacing the drive, insuring that the connectors are properly seated, and none of the pins are bent.

Also, as was asked before, when you powered on the laptop, did you go to the BIOS setup screen (Often a <Del> or <F10> key after turning on the power, but check your operator's manual for details.) to confirm that the hard drive was seen by the computer?