Arch Linux

paris3200

Member

Registered: 2012-12-08

Posts: 22

[SOLVED] Hard Drive not seen by install cd

I'm trying to install arch from the cd onto an old desktop I had laying around.  I'm following the beginers guide but the hard drive isn't seen.

# cfdisk /dev/sda
FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive. 
Press any key to exit cfdisk

The hard drive test good.  I booted up onto a gparted cd and it saw it without any problems.  I also swapped drives just to be sure but still get the same error.

Running fdisk-l doesn't show the drive either.

I'm guessing I need to load drivers for the motherboard, but I don't know how to even start

Last edited by paris3200 (2013-03-08 17:49:03)

henk

Member

From: Weert, Netherlands

Registered: 2013-01-01

Posts: 334

Re: [SOLVED] Hard Drive not seen by install cd

How old is old? If it uses IDE you could try /dev/hda instead of /dev/sda.

According to this thread IDE support is removed, and you
should probably need a workaround. (comment #9)

Edit: another mayby helpfull thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=105760

Last edited by henk (2013-03-07 09:27:25)

paris3200

Member

Registered: 2012-12-08

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] Hard Drive not seen by install cd

The hard drive is a SATA drive.  The only thing IDE is the CD drive.

s1ln7m4s7r

Member

Registered: 2013-02-22

Posts: 262

Re: [SOLVED] Hard Drive not seen by install cd

Does

lsblk | grep disk

detect your disk?

EDIT: Check this page

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117047

maybe it can be something like this!

Last edited by s1ln7m4s7r (2013-03-07 12:54:16)

paris3200

Member

Registered: 2012-12-08

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] Hard Drive not seen by install cd

lsblk | grep disk

Doesn't find anything.  I have already deleted the partition using gparted, but will try that command in the linked post.

paris3200

Member

Registered: 2012-12-08

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] Hard Drive not seen by install cd

Okay, so I booted up onto an old OpenSuse live cd.  It saw the drive, so I used it to run

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M

After booting the arch cd again lsblk still doesn't show the disk.   I don't understand why every linux cd I boot can see it but Arch.  I even tried an older Arch cd I had and it didn't see the drive either.

paris3200

Member

Registered: 2012-12-08

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] Hard Drive not seen by install cd

After going through the bios I found that the hard drive was in IDE mode even though it was a SATA drive.  Switched the drive to RAID mode and the install cd saw the hard drive without any problems.  That also made the on board network card work as well. 

Thanks for the tip about IDE not being supported anymore.  Without that I never would have guessed that the bios settings might be an issue.