SATA 250GB & "No hard disks found"
 

SuSE 9.2 and 9.3 fail to find my hard drive. Dell says it is a
(EIDE/SATA) 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with Native Command Queuing 1

My five-year-old copy of Acronis finds it and I have made free-space
on it with Arconis 10.0

The box is a
Dimension 5150 Intel Pentium D 820 with Dual Core Processing
(2.8GHz, 2X1MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB)
Intel® 945G Chipset

MS seems to run well but SuSE fails to install because it says
"No hard disks were found for the installation."

Do I have a chance of getting Linux to run on this box? I would
appreciate hearing about any success at 64-bit and SATA HD

Thanks
DaveWat

It seems like your install CD doesn't have the SATA drivers. Try booting Knoppix and see if it works. Also try the install CD on another computer (which has IDE). One distro (Puppy Linux) which I have has no SATA or SCSI support, so I simply can't use it anymore.

What does the following command show?
Note that's a lowercase "L"

When I installed slackware on my desktop that has sata, I had to tell the installer to use the sata.i kernel. Don't know if that would work in Suse though, try F1 or F2 once your installer cd has booted. it might give you an option that is similar.

A friend of mine had the same problem with Suse 9.3, and it was also due to the SATA drives in his machine. The experience was enough to completely put him off making the switch to Linux. :(

I'm hoping to get him to try again with Suse 10.0 or more likely 10.1. Hopefully he'll eventually be willing to give it another try.

That is quite strange. I have used a pair of 80 GB Western Digital SATA drives since SUSE 9.3, with absolutely no problems. In fact, I run them in SATA RAID0 array. SUSE is the only distro where I've actually been able to easily set up the RAID array. The SATA drives have just been recognized....I haven't done anything specific during the install. That's using the SATA drives with an MSI KT6V motherboard.

Regards,
zenarcher

My own PC, which has SATA drives worked just fine with Suse 9.3 too, but my friend had the "no drives found" error with the SATA drives in his PC, using the same install disc as I'd used. I guess it's just certain drives (or possibly certain controllers) that aren't supported. Hopefully there's better support for them in 10.0 and 10.1, but as I said, I haven't had a chance to try them yet.

I've been using SUSE 10.0 since it's release and had the same install experience. Also running SATA RAID0 with 10.0. I'm expecting the same with 10.1. I think you are probably correct....the problem being related to certain drives or controllers, especially since you had no issue with thesme install disk.

Cheers,
zenarcher

Some mobo's only support SATA 1. SATA drives usually come strapped for SATA 2. May not be your problem but you could move the drive strap to SATA 1 to see if it works. SATA 2 is faster.

The SuSE CDs install with no problems on other machines
and Knoppix 3.7 with no parameters loaded with no problems but
fdisk /dev/hda responded with 'unable to open /dev/hda'

fdisk -l responded with only a prompt under Knoppix

It seems odd that the hard disk is so difficult to find but
the other Linux distributions I have tried can't find it
either. But an old (2001) version of Acronis, which is just
a self-loading DOS program is able to find the HD. Someone
must know but I don't have a clue.

Well, the fdisk response does indicate that it's not seeing a SATA drive, which would be sda rather than hda.

I'm lost as well. As to DOS working, perhaps something is amiss that makes Linux not recognize the drive. DOS may determine drive availability in a different way that at least makes it appear to work. They are after all beasts of very different colors. Sorry I have no constructive suggestions other than what I already offered.