Ubuntu Installation :: Can't See Drives - Alternate Installer Doesn't Detect Windows - No Boot?
Feb 16, 2011
I have a Windows XP system, and wanted to install Ubuntu to a 100 GB XT3 partition on the same drive. I was told I could chainload Ubuntu from the NT Loader menu. I booted from a Ubuntu 10.04 CD and ran the installer. It didn't find any hard drives. On a hunch, I tried the 10.04 alternate installer CD. That DID find the hard drive and partitions. I had the installer make /dev/sda7 (the XT3 partition) the root. Installation proceeded smoothly, but then the installer told me it did not see any other OS's on my drive! Why? I directed the installer to place grub on /dev/sda7 instead of the MBR.
Per the instructions I was given, I used DD to copy the first 512 bytes of /dev/sda7 to the Windows primary partition (sda1) as bootloader.lnx. But the resulting file is empty, and it won't boot. I repeated the whole process - formatting, installing FOUR times, and same results. I have no idea where GRUB was installed. It is apparently not in the MBR, because I still have my normal Windows boot. I downloaded the 10.10 alternate installer and got the same exact results. Even switched from XT3 to XT4. After two weeks of this nonsense, I still have yet to see Linux boot.
I've just installed Fedora (F13) for the first time, on a new HDD, to give myself a dual-boot system. So currently I have:
So, at the appropriate stage in the install menu, there is an option for where to install GRUB, and a drop-down to choose which drive is the primary BIOS boot drive.
However, in both cases, no other drive except my new sdc is visible. So, I can install GRUB to MBR of sdc, or to first sector of boot partition - but no option to put it to my primary boot drive MBR on sda.
Likewise, in the GRUB configuration page, if I go to Add another OS, the only option it gives me is my new Fedora install. It doesn't list the Vista OS on sda at all.
The result is that I can boot to either OS by changing the boot drive priority in BIOS.
I guess my question is this: - is this expected behaviour from the installer, meaning that I'll need to configure GRUB manually somehow? (gulp ) or - did I do something wrong in the install process? or - is this some weird bug manifesting itself?
I have a Centos 5.5 system with 2* 250 gig sata physical drives, sda and sdb. Each drive has a linux raid boot partition and a Linux raid LVM partition. Both pairs of partitions are set up with raid 1 mirroring. I want to add more data capacity - and I propose to add a second pair of physical drives - this time 1.5 terabyte drives presumably sdc and sdd. I assume I can just plug in the new hardware - reboot the system and set up the new partitions, raid arrays and LVMs on the live system. My first question:
1) Is there any danger - that adding these drives to arbitrary sata ports on the motherboard will cause the re-enumeration of the "sdx" series in such a way that the system will get confused about where to find the existing raid components and/or the boot or root file-systems? If anyone can point me to a tutorial on how the enumeration of the "sdx" sequence works and how the system finds the raid arrays and root file-system at boot time
2) I intend to use the majority of the new raid array as an LVM "Data Volume" to isolate "data" from "system" files for backup and maintenance purposes. Is there any merit in creating "alternate" boot partitions and "alternate" root file-systems on the new drives so that the system can be backed up there periodically? The intent here is to boot from the newer partition in the event of a corruption or other failure of the current boot or root file-system. If this is a good idea - how would the system know where to find the root file-system if the original one gets corrupted. i.e. At boot time - how does the system know what root file-system to use and where to find it?
3) If I create new LVM /raid partitions on the new drives - should the new LVM be part of the same "volgroup" - or would it be better to make it a separate "volgroup"? What are the issues to consider in making that decision?
I downloaded this "debian-6.0.1a-amd64-netinst" iso image....But on the partitioning screen, after selecting the manual partitioning, it shows the whole hard disk without detecting the XP partitions.
When I tried to install Ubuntu 9.10 or 10.04 (from CD or USB drive), and selected manual partitioning, the installer would not show all my drives.
However, when booting the life CD/USB, gparted or the Disk Utility did recognize all drives and partitions.
It turned out that one of my drives was marked as RAID partition, although I never used RAID!
Here the symptom:
When you run the installer and select "manual partitioning", the resulting list of drives and partitions is incomplete. In my example it was:
sda - sda1 sdc - sdc1
[Code]....
You may have multiple drives with the RAID metadata on it. In that case you need to repeat the above command for all those drives. Just make sure you don't wipe out your existing RAID, if you have one.
Reboot the system and see if it works.
P.S.: Also check your BIOS settings - do you have drives configured as RAID?
I am trying to install Debian Lenny (64 bit) on my brand new Toshiba laptop (intel i3, 3 GB RAM) and for some reason the installer cannot detect the ethernet card. This is the error message I get:"No Ethernet card was detected. If you know the name of the driver needed by your Ethernet card, you can select it from the list."And then there's a list which is quite long -- and I cannot replicate it here. But I want to know why the installer cannot find the ethernet card on its own or find the appropriate driver. In any case how can I fix this problem?
I'm trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 alongside Windows 7, but when I boot from the CD, Ubuntu refuses to detect the presence of Windows 7. I tried unplugging all my external hard drives to see if that made a difference, but Ubuntu still can't tell that I have Windows 7 on there.
I have an Asus P5K motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Duo 8400. It has 2 SATA hard disks, a 250 GB Seagate and a 500GB Hitachi.
I've been running Fedora 10 x86_64 for 6 months on this computer without problems.
I'm trying to do a new Fedora 11 install on this computer but the installer (Anaconda?) only detects the Hitachi disk.
I've tried to make a new Fedora 10 install to check if it was a media or disk problem and it detects the two hard disks.
I've tried to install it via a Live CD, and the installer only detects the Hitachi disk. The LiveCD detects the two hard disks, I can access it, partition, format, write, but the installer only detects the Hitachi.
I've tried to change from Enhanced SATA (AHCI) to Compatible in BIOS without success and I've changed SATA cables from one disk to the other, changed the disk order and nothing.
Must I enter some boot parameters for Fedora 11? Has the LiveCD installer some options?
Ubuntu in Windows 7 (64 bits) File system installed using Wubi I got Ubuntu 10.04 LTS intalled using Wubi. That means Ubuntu resides inside Windows file / folder system. It also means Ubuntu does not have its own partition. Here is what I found out:
1) It cannot detect wireless network unlike Win 7 on this same laptop. However, when I plug in ethernet cable, it was able to detect it. Is there a fix this problem?
2) I cannot see Windows folders. How do access windows folder from Ubuntu side and vice versa?
3) I forgot to set the disk space for Ubuntu during install and I think the default is 17 GB.Would this cause me problems? If so, what do I need to do? How do I expand the disk space for Ubuntu?
I installed Ubuntu using Wubi, and the boot loader does not detect my keyboard. Does the windows boot loader only support PS2 keyboards? Would there be a workaround... like install DOS drivers for it? I have a logitech s520 keyboard.
When in Windows, I can select what OS to use, but is there a way I can select which OS to use while booted into Ubuntu? Is there a program that will let me modify the windows boot loader from within Ubuntu?
I've searched the forums, internet, etc... and I can't seem to find anything on this. I installed Windows 7 using ~70% of my available hard drive space, the other 30% is unallocated. there are two partitions, the 100MB 'System' partition and the NTFS one with Windows 7.
On my first attempt to install Ubuntu: The partitions didn't look right. It detected two NTFS partitions, the first one of 100MB, and a second NTFS partition using ~30% of my hard drive, and 70% (presumably Windows) as unallocated. I decided to go ahead and try to install it over the 30% NTFS partition thinking that maybe the installer just didn't recognize the free space right or something, but after that happened, Nothing loaded and my Windows partition was trashed.
I wiped the drive, and reinstalled Windows again with the 70/30 split. On my second attempt to install Ubuntu: On step 4 of the installation process (partitions) it doesn't detect my Windows 7 installation at all. Instead, it says the disk is 100% unallocated.
Does anyone know why the Ubuntu Installer is not detecting my Windows partition correctly? If so, how can I go about getting Ubuntu to see it and install itself along side Windows?
I recently did a fresh install of Windows 7 on my laptop, then shrunk my partition and set aside some free space for Ubuntu. When I went to install Ubuntu, however, it told me that no operating systems had been detected on the system. I ignored this message and just installed Ubuntu on the free space, but when the installation was finished, GRUB failed to recognize Windows 7 as well and would only boot into Ubuntu.
After several attempts at getting GRUB to see W7, I eventually gave up and used my W7 CD to reinstall the Windows bootloader which, naturally, didn't detect Ubuntu and would only allow me to boot Windows.
I've tried messing around with my Windows partition a bit, but no matter what configuration I use, I can't seem to get the Karmic installer to see it. I've resorted to using WUBI for now, but I'd really like to have Ubuntu on its own partition in case something goes wrong with Windows; plus, I'd love to be able to use ext4 and GRUB. Anybody know how I can get around this issue?
I've used the same install CD on several other machines with Windows 7 and it recognized them just fine. It's only this one computer that's having the issue.
I am running Windows XP Pro SP3 and it is currently setup on a system running 2 SCSI drives with an adaptec 2940 UW (non RAID) PCI card both are 18.4 GB. Windows XP is installed on the first one and I am trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 onto the second, but the installation doesn't recognize that windows is installed on the first drive and only gives me that drive as an option to install... Gparted recognizes both, one as an NTFS file system (sdb) and the second as a unpartitioned drive (sdc) and for some reason is placing the usb drive as sda which i'm assuming might cause some issues with grub boot loader later on after the drive is removed. what might be causing this issue and how i would go about fixing it... should i just go to 10.04 and upgrade to 11.04 after?
I'm trying to set up a dual boot of Ubuntu & Windows XP.I have two hard disks installed - sda is 80GB and has an existing Windows setup on it, sdb is my 160GB data storage disk.When I have installed Ubuntu on other machines, it has detected any exisiting OS's and offered to install Ubuntu alongside them.
However, this time Windows doesn't seem to be detected - it says 'no other operating systems found' and wants to install to my second (i.e. sdb) disk. I was intending for Ubuntu & Windows to sit side-by-side on the first hard disk.Although I've installed Ubuntu before, I'm a bit of a novice and I'm not sure how to achieve this - where am I going wrong?
I downloaded wubi.exe from Opera 10.61. The file downloads ok, but then refuses to do anything when I click on the file.
I also switched to my IE version, and tried to run the file from there. Again, I get the hourglass symbol for a couple of seconds, then nothing.
I'm running Windows 98. I know, I should have a newer version, but finances can't manage that right now. In the meantime, is there a manual way to run the installer for wubi and get it to work?
I'm trying to setup a dual boot system with Windows Vista 64 (already installed) and Ubuntu 10.10. I added a new drive which is identical to the one Vista is installed on. When I boot into the LiveCD I can see and mount the second drive and edit it in Gparted. However, when I use the installer it will only bring up the drive that already has Vista installed.
I just installed ubuntu via the windows installer. When I try to boot it, it comes up a cmd line and gives me some choices of boot/grub... and boot/disk/... they all lead back to the cmd line except the boot/disk option which leads to a message saying that it cant find the disk...
I have Mint 9 installed on a 120GB, WD SATA HDD. Now I want to install Ubuntu 10.10 on this HDD. Downloaded i386 desktop image and created a bootable USB stick with the image. System boots fine but installer do not detect My HDD. It only lists my USB drive. Even Gparted donot detect the drive. Typing sudo fdisk -l also lists only my USB Drive.
Ubuntu installer does not detect my sata drive during installation.
Hardware: Asus p4gv-mx 4gb ram 250gb wd sataII drive ide cdrom Bios options tried: Disabling apci 2.0 disabling apci
setting IDE mode to [Enhanced] [compatibility] w/both sata only, pata& sata settings Setting my pata cdrom to slave and plugging it into the slave position of the ide ribbon.
I've tried these combinations with the usb installer, and dvd installer. I've tried loading the live cd/dvd & usb then running the installer with in. I've tried the spacebar method, hitting f6 and apci=no, noapci
The live cd has no problems detecting and mounting my hdd, however the installer does not detect it.
i wiped my entire hard drive that had xp as its only OS. I freshly installed a Windows 7 ultimate and everything went perfectly. I then decided to install 10.4. I split the partitions correctly (i had experience doing this already with my laptop, which has xp/10.4). Ubuntu 10.4 install went flawlessly, except for one thing. Now when i boot up the pc, it goes straight into 10.4. I have tried holding shift during the start up to force the boot menu, and it just shows the Ubuntu 10.4 OS as choices. Any clue what i could do to make Win7 appear in the boot menu?
I'm using the Ubuntu 9.10 alternate install CD in an external PATA USB CD drive to try to install Ubuntu on a ThinkPad X60. The installer boots but then very quickly gets to a stage where it complains that, "No Common CD-ROM drive was detected". It asks you to point out the drive or load or select drivers, but there aren't any drives or drivers to choose. I brought up another console, and looked in /dev, but there isn't anything there that resembles a CD drive.
I tried $ modprobe ide-scsi But it can't find the module.
I followed the instructions here, found the drivers on a working system, and put them on a thumbdrive. However, when I mount it: $ mkdir /tmp/drive $ mount /dev/sdc1 /tmp/drive
Mount fails due to an "invalid argument," with two different USB drives that work just fine on other systems. When even mount doesn't work, I feel like I've got both hands tied behind my back. How I can correctly implement the above command-line fixes? I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I've installed different Ubuntus probably a dozen times over the years, and haven't gotten stuck this badly since somewhere around version 4. Whether this problem is specifically related to the fact that my external USB CD drive has a PATA interface. If I go out and buy or borrow a SATA USB CD drive, is this problem likely to go away?
I have a Dell Poweredge 2970 2x3.0 GHz AMD 64bit dual core, Perc 5/i controller, and 2 brand new Fujitso SAS 15K 146GB drives.
Trying to install Ubuntu 10.04 Server 64 bit from USB. At the point of detecting disks, the installer only recognizes the USB. The installation was created using Pendriveinstaller ver1.8.0.1 per Ubuntu Server web site instructions. I have the drives configured as 2 separate raid 0 arrays using the bios raid configurator. The drives have been initialized. (Tried before with a single Raid 1 array, but had same issue and since have read Ubuntu support for hardware raid is not great, so was going to bypass hardware raid for now).
I've seen some chatter on here about opening a terminal at this point and removing dmraid but don't see an option for terminal only shell.
I am trying to install ubuntu 10.10 and windows 7 on my hard drive. I want to install both the OS on seperate drives. can anyone tell how to do it? I know that there are screenshots on ubunutu site itself but i am new to ubuntu and I am unable to follow instructions.
I first installed ubuntu 10.10 in dec 2010 using my ubuntu dvd. Now I am reinstalling it again but the setup screens have changed? hows that possible? i mean its the same disk. does anyone know why? or am i drunk.
I have 2 identical hard drives that was used as a RAID0, the raid array was removed, and confirmed the removal with the raid utlity. Bios settings are not set to raid. So one hdd has WinXP occupying it, and I want to use the other hdd for ubuntu. For some reason, ubuntu installer still sees it as an array of both hdds. Gpart see them as both array and individual drives. Does anyone know how to correct this? M
I have a dual CPU Xeon machine that I have been using various versions of fedora on for years.
The machine has the following disk layout:
I currently have Fedora 10 and grub installed on hda and I had to jump through hoops to install such as disabling the promise controller and reassigning drives because that blasted /dev/mapper kept grabbing the Maxtor ATA drives although I didn't want it to.
Anyway, in the BIOS I can boot from the secondary IDE controller so I want to install Fedora 13 on hdb. Problem is, the Fedora installer won't detect the drive.
Its partition table is as follows:
There is approximately 69GB of free space on this disk but the blasted python based installer wont show the disk as a possible installation location. If I exit to a bash shell I see that the device nodes do exist and I can manually mount and manipulate the disk but the installer is brain dead where the disk is concerned.
I will mention that sdc, sdi, and sdj are used with mdadm to create high performance striped volumes. Also, sdc shows up under /dev/mapper and I don't want to use /dev/mapper at all. I want simple /dev/sd? mount points...no stinking /dev/mapper, and no stinkin volume manager wrappers...
Why I cannot get the installer to use /dev/sdb?
Is there a disk signature on /dev/hd[bc] that is causing them to be grabbed by /dev/mapper, and if so, how would I remove that signature from the drive? /dev/mapper is vacant under Fedora 10.
I have a ssd cosair harddisk with both usb and sata connecters. If I connect it with sata anything is working fine, and I managed to install Fedora core 13.
But I also want to be able to use the harddisk when it is connected with usb and that causes problems.
When I boot the Fedora Core 13 dvd It can't detect my usb harddisk.
When booting in install mode it just don't detect the harddisk.
When booting the dvd in rescue mode it don't detect the harddisk, and it don't create any entries in /dev/ for the harddisk. It is like there is no disk at all.
I have tested this on 3 different computers, so it is not a problem with my specific motherboard. So either it is a problem between my harddisk and Fedora Core 13, or there is some problems with the usb drivers in the boot image used by the Fedora core 13 dvd.
The disk is working fine if I connect it via usb to an existing Windows install, so the usb connection is working.
I installed Fedora core 13 with the harddisk connected to sata and then re-connected the harddisk to usb. It then boot up, but complain about missing root filesystem. Most likely caused by missing usb driver in my kernel.
But anyway, what I really want is the ability to boot from both sata and usb, so I can take the harddisk with me and boot it on other computers with usb.
So is there a command which allows me to build an kernel image which can boot from usb or am I trying to do something which is not really supported?
I did update my fstab to use LABEL=myroot
There is 1 Windows partition(NTFS) and 1 linux partition on the disk. (No seperate /boot partition and no swap)
I'm a n00b at dual booting and I plan on installing Ubuntu 10.04 on a separate hard drive than my Windows 7 64 bit one in a dual boot situation. I have read that you can do this by unplugging the Windows hard drive, install Ubuntu on the other one, and than plug the Windows hard drive back in and everything will be fine and dandy. Is this correct? If it is, will I have to manually set the Primary and Secondary drive (in the BIOS I think?), or will it automatically do that.
I am attempting to install on a HP ML110 box. It has 2 SATA drives installed. From the live cd I can do fdisk -l and see both drives, I can see both from GPated but during the actual install it doesn't see any drives in which to install.
“toshiba satellite u840w with hard disk drive and a solid state disk cache”
Debian 8 installer does not detect the hard drive during installation
I've recently tried to installed Debian 8. The problem is that the partition menu gives me these 3 options: 1. Configure iSCSI volumes 2. Undo changes to partitions 3. Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
There are no options for defining partitions or any hard drive during installation. After searching the internet i found that the problem because the solid state disk SSD cache. How I install a Debian 8 with computer which has a hard disk drive and a solid state disk cache.
more info: I want windows 7(64) and debian dual boot
