Erasing SATA HD

[oliver79]

I currently have an unstable release of Debian on my SATA HD, now I have come to attempt a fresh install of Debian "stable" and when I have run through set-up, it says it is unable to continue due to their being no partitions on the HD!! "check that your HD is connected to you're machine", Well that is strange as it is and will continue to run Debian unstable! Anyone any suggestions on how I (a) Delete the HD, and (b) install a fresh copy of stable Debian?

Many thanks

Oliver

[bidi]

My best guess is that the default Debian Sarge kernel doesn't support your SATA controller. Try booting with the 2.6 kernel ("linux26" on the isolinux prompt). If that doesn't help, look through the boot help and see if there's any kernel parameters you should specify.

[oliver79]

Hi:

Thanks for that. So obviously the unsupported version of Debian currently has SATA support, yet the stable distros possibly may not yet have this functionality?

thanks

Oliver

[techieMoe]

Hi:

Thanks for that. So obviously the unsupported version of Debian currently has SATA support, yet the stable distros possibly may not yet have this functionality?

thanks

Oliver

In the case of Debian, yes. The 2.4 kernel used by Debian "Sarge" (stable) doesn't have support for SATA as far as I know, but the 2.6 kernel does. As for "stable distros" I think you'll find that pretty much every other distribution on the market today besides Slackware uses the 2.6 kernel (with SATA support) by default, so you shouldn't have much trouble getting Linux installed using anything else. You can install Debian if you just make sure to use the 2.6 kernel as suggested above.

[oliver79]

Thanks guy's!

So when I install (stable) I simply select the 2.6 kernel ("linux26" on the isolinux prompt)? Do I need to download an alternative version, which has the inclusion of the 2.6 Kernel?

Thanks

Oliver

[bidi]

Debian Sarge comes with the 2.6 kernel on the CD, it's just not the default. So for you first question "yes", and your second questions "no".

I'll also add that Debian's 2.4 kernel does include SATA support (speaking from experience) just no support for the new ones, specially since it uses the 2.4.27 version (latest is 2.4.32).

[oliver79]

Ok, just ran through set-up and at no point prior to my reaching the error message relating to the partition issue, does "sarge" give me the opportunity to install 2.6 Kernel! Could you please tell me where I'm going wrong!

Sorry to be a pain

Oliver

[kfizzle]

i had same probs trying to install sarge on my sata drive...

apparently for me, the sarge kernel 2.6 doesnt have built in ntfs or sata support
while the kernel 2.4 does for me

i run into other problems though after installing sarge kernel 2.4 on my sata
first it wouldnt let me install lilo anywhere, im a bigger lilo fan than grub
but they both work i guess

its good idea to disconnect all ide hard drives before installing debian on sata
that way grub will install itself on the sata mbr and not the first ide drive mbr

my problem i ran into:
when i tried to install lilo later on inside debian
it gave me error that my partition table wasnt right
so it gave me option to either ignore or fix the partition table
i chose fix at first since i thought ignore wasnt doing anything
while ignore actually does the job fine

but after i chose fix table
it kinda ruined my whole sata drive, to where now i gotta ship it back to the warehouse
now my sata drive doesnt even let me load anything dos or windows 98 or any boot floppy or anything
it wont even let me run windows xp pro sp2 install cd
thats how bad my sata drive got messed up just cause of something in the partition or something

i cant even figure out if it was a virus or something....
but i guess the seagate sata drive didnt work for me, it was running fine at beginning booting dos and eveyrthing, but now its all gone

otherwise my sata drive still runs a 90 something percent perfect linux
my kde just freezes whenever i try to log out thats it.....

and ya i just put in an ide drive back in there instead..............
wasted almost 3-4 days trying to get my sata drive running...

its prolly just the drive, supposedly it had something more or too many extra cylinders or something not sure what it was

[oliver79]

Oh dear, that doesn't sound to good!!!!!!!!

Well, will prob have to leave the unstable verion on for now then! However I wil try a fresh install of Windows just to check that my SATA HD isn't ruinned also!

[kfizzle]

sry,

i figured out what was wrong with my sata drive,
there wasnt anything wrong with it

but what i did notice was:

if youre using dual/multi boot with linux and windows etc

for example:
im using 98, xp pro, and linux

98 and xp pro doesnt function right on any hard drive sata or ide, if there's more than one primary partition on it
i didnt know that before

cause what i was doing was i had a primary boot partition, for windows boot files, primary swap, primary linux, and then extended partitions for my 98 and xp

and cause i setup my sata drive that way
none of my windows stuff would work, including my floppy bootdisks that used dos as system

i couldnt use any partition managers including partition magic to fix my sata drive after i used lilo to fix tables on it, so i downloaded the hard drive manufacturer format program and reformatted the whole drive and then re-setup everything on my sata drive, with 1 primary partition only, and everything else on extended

and it worked
i had to use kernel 2.4 for debian to make my sata drive work
but then kernel 2.4 is too buggy for my pc, so i tried updating my 2.4.17 kernel to 2.4.32
and while i was at it everything was fine until i messed up my grub and wiped it out by mistake using fdisk /mbr

and believe me, sata drives are the not the best thing to use as main drives for your linux pc
considering i tried extremely hard to use livecds to recover my sata linux partition
i tried chroot /mnt/sata on my livecd
and tried grub-install hd0 or running liloconfig on it
NONE OF EM WORK ON SATA....

at least not for me,
so finally i switched back to an ide drive and now going to use sata drive as my storage drive instead, instead of the other way around with sata as main drive

because its hard to recover linux partitions on sata drive