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adanedhel728 07-23-2010 11:27 PM

LiveCD does not recognize Barracuda HDD, alternate CD can't even load
 
My ultimate goal right now is to get Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit (cannot be 32 bit) installed on my internal hard drive (in particular, dual-booting with Win7).

When I try to start the LiveCD, it gives me an error that says "The installer encountered an unrecoverable error. A desktop session will now be run so that you may investigate the problem or try installing again." Now, I know that that problem is common, but the solutions given online make no difference. And that's not even close to being the extent of my problem.

(FYI, this happens after the keyboard icon where I can push a button to bring up a menu.)

After that, it successfully takes me to a LiveCD desktop (where I'm typing this now, actually). But, it doesn't see my hard drive. It shows my external drive, but not my internal. It also seems to think I have a floppy drive. And when I try to install, it doesn't show my internal drive.

I tried restarting, obviously, tried reburning the disk. I checked the disk integrity and it's ok. I tried installing without going to the desktop first, made no difference. I tried the previous version so that I could upgrade (with hesitance, I've had bad luck with upgrading recently), and it still couldn't see my hard drive.

Then I tried the alternate cd. While loading, it told me to make sure the disk was in the drive because it wasn't reading it. So, I did a disk check on that and got the message "The ./pool/main/b/branding-ubuntu_0.4-0ubuntu1_all.deb file failed the MD5 checksum verification. Your CD-ROM or this file may have been corrupted."
I tried reburning it. Nero didn't even give me an option about what speed, it burned it at 10x. Same problem.

I tried googling the problem, but, as so often happens when I google Linux problems, the most recent solutions come from 2006.

Here's some links to my specs (it's a custom-built machine):

(Edit: Note that this is a different machine than the one described in my sig.)

Hard drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3750528AS 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3 LGA 1156 Intel P55 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard SATA 3.0, USB 3.0, 3x USB power

If it's relevant, optical drive that I'm using to burn the disks and install the OS: Sony Optiarc Black 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 12X DVD+R DL 24X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA DVD/CD Rewritable Drive - OEM

I think that's all that's relevant, but I can post more if you need it.

I'm going to continue trying solutions, but in the meantime I'd really appreciate if anyone could help me out.

whansard 07-24-2010 01:02 AM

try booting the disk with the external drive unhooked. This is almost surely an ubuntu kernel problem that will go away with a significantly different version or distribution.

adanedhel728 07-24-2010 11:21 AM

I actually already tried that, and then it didn't see any hard drive at all.

I'm downloading Fedora 13 now, but if possible I'd really like to get Ubuntu working on this somehow. (I'd really miss Synaptic.) But you think that an old version of Ubuntu, then upgrading, might work?

Edit: I'm also using an Intel 64-bit CPU instead of an AMD. Would that make any difference? Maybe that's a stupid question.

Update: It turns out that the previous problem with the alternate CD was that the iso file I had was bad. But, unfortunately, nevertheless, the new iso for the alternate CD, just like the LiveCD, also does not recognize my hard drive. So, now I have the same problem with the alternate CD as I do with the LiveCD, they just don't detect my hard drive.

I briefly tried Fedora. The LiveCD booted, but I got all kinds of errors. And, I think I want to exhaust every possible way to get Ubuntu before I resort to teaching myself an entirely new distro.

adanedhel728 07-28-2010 07:32 PM

Ok, I'm going to have to bump this again, because I've had no luck getting past this.

Skaperen 07-29-2010 12:54 PM

I know you intend to install 64-bit. But can you at least try 32-bit LiveCD to see if that could be connected to the issue?

The other suggestion I have is to try a Slackware ISO. It is less complex than other distributions. When you get to the point where you have a shell prompt after logging in as root, type the command
Code:

cat /proc/partitions
and see if your drive is present as /dev/sda in that list.

Also, can the OS that comes up from LiveCD also read the CD itself (one that is attached to SATA)?

adanedhel728 07-30-2010 01:11 AM

Oh, I forgot to post to say that this was solved through Google (though not easily, it's not like I posted before Googling). I had the same problem as this guy. Basically, Ubuntu couldn't read the SATA port that I had my hard drive connected to, particularly (in my case) it couldn't use SATA3. I plugged it into a SATA2 port and it worked fine.

Thanks for the help, though, everyone.


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