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

I went to install SUSE Pro 9.3 planning to setup a dual boot with winXP on my laptop.

When YaST is analyzing me system, an error pops up - "No hard disks were found, pleas chack your hardware!". Very frustrating.

I click OK and th analysis ends but at the part of the screen under "Partitioning", in lovely red font, it says "No automatic proposal possible. Specify mount points maunally in the 'Partitioner' dialogue."

So, I go to the partitioner dialogue to be greeted by a message saying "No didks found, please use the update CD for installation."

Obviously i cant progress any further from here. What does all this mean? I hope i wont get a chorus of RTFM!

Just migrating from windows, so ive little knowledge of linux...

Thanks!

No hard disks found, means it couldn't find a hard disk to install to.
I take it Windows boots up O.K.?
Is this a SATA drive? hmmm, other people have installed SUSE 9.3 on SATA, but...
Did you use a partitioning tool before you tried to install SUSE?

I have this same problem with my server but only in the later versions. The highest version I can use is SuSE 9.1 as all later versions seem unable to find any hard disks but then I can put this down to the fact it is a rather old, dual PII server with old SCSI controllers to match, for which I can only assume they phased out the linux drivers for them in the latter versions.
For your case I would suggest going into XP and going to the "Device Manager" (right click My Computer => Properties => Hardware tab) and look within the section that says Disk Drives. Post in the name of the drive and we might be able to find whether the disk type could be the cause.

Yeah, windows boots fine.

I didnt use a partitioning tool before attempting to install 9.3 no.
After failing to get 9.3 working, i went and installed 9.1

...it worked

But i really want to get 9.3 up and running since i forked out for it...

My HD is ATA. Its a hitachi HTS548080M9AT00.

Did you try the other installation options, like acpi=off or the safe install mode?

I think the problem is your drive is one of the types they might have cut out from the install process and no safe settings on installs will really help you. What I would suggest looking round for is a module disk you could use during the installation so it can use the new files to understand what the hard drive is.

Arent module disks for servers ?

Do you think using an external HD would work?

The other installation options presented the same error

Module disks just have the drivers for the less common products which they either couldn't fit onto the main one or they didn't feel they would require them. If you install from floppy disks, for example, for SuSE 9.2 you need three boot disks, then module disk 3 for network cards and possibly module disk 4 for PCMCIA. I think you might require module disk 1 but that should be included if you are installing from CD/DVD.
I gave up in the end trying to get 9.2 to work so I just stuck with 9.1, but I realise you dilema, having paid for SuSE 9.2, I can see your reason for wanting it.

I am insatlling from DVD 1 so you think the module disk is on there? Is there anyway i have to activate it like a boot option or anything?

Ive no floppy on the laptop and just the one DVD/CD-RW. so floppies are a no no...