Cant see the forest beacuse the trees are in the way...SUSE 9.3

[siennalizard]

My drive is not SATA, other distros, and even SuSE's own live-cd boot fine and install. I also have no floppy drive.

Is there anyway that I could begin a 9.3 install from within a running system, like I might with Gentoo?

It seems mad that SuSE would release a live-cd for evaluation purposes, which loads different modules, etc. than does the install medium they sell.

I would be grateful for any assistance: it's tht old chestnut: "No hard disks were found for the installation. Please check your hardware".

For the benefit of anyone who's been trawling around looking for an answer to this, I've searched the Novell/SuSE site fully, and this thread is the closest I've come to my problem.

If you look at the virtual terminals, on the one you get to with ctrl-alt f4 is the output of syslog, and you can see it trying to access the hard disk, which it properly identifies. The issue is that it cannot detect the drive's attributes. You can see it complain, "0 PHYSICAL HEADS?". The kernel complains that "Device not ready". and that "wcache flush failed".

Many thanks!
J.

[siennalizard]

Seems to be a problem with Fujitsu drives. Here's how I got round it:

http://hardware.mcse.ms/message183970.html

Add "insmod=ide-generic" to the boot options line. I had tried loading this module manually at install, but had no success.

Please let me know if this solves your problem, and I'll make this info more public - might help some others.

J.

[ultra_violence]

It worked!!!!

insmod=ide-generic solved it!!!

I owe you a large amount of beer my friend...

[btimber]

I have been trying to set up a dual boot system with one 40 gig STATA drive. I have able to install 9.3, but cannot then mount my WindowsXP partition from Linux. Also when i do try to mount it the windows NTFS parition is sometimes damaged.

I have been fiddling with this all week and finally thougth it might have something to do with the sata drive so went in to the bios and set the SATA operation to "combined" (Dell Optiplex gx280 with integrated SATA - intel chipset).

When I change this setting from 'normal" and then boot Suse from Grub the boot process seems to get going, but fails with a "waiting for /dev/sda to start" error. I expected this since I had changed the nature of the drive from SATA to something more like IDE. Figured the drive designations in fstab and other files would be hosed.

I also figured I might be able to recover the system with the installation disk, but when i go into installtion (DVD1) I get the "cant find hard disk" error.

When change the BIOS setting back to "normal" SATA operation all comes up fine.

I noticed during the install With SATA on "Normal" the windows partition was not recognized. However, the system must have seen it to some degree because when i booted the first time the windows partition had been automatically added to fstab, but when the system tried to mount it during the boot process it failed. When I try to mount it byu hand I get an "unrecogtnized file system" error and the mount fails. Windows is not included in the GRUB menus but can be added by hand and will boot. However, about every third time swithing operating systems the windows boot fails and I have use recovery console and fixboot to get it going again.

The disk is a Western digital drive built for Dell ( I guess) WD-XL80SD-2.

[vmbrasseur]

The insmod line in the above post worked beautifully for me. The SuSE 9.3 installation immediately recognized my new 160GB SATA drive.

Many thanks to the community at large,

--V