Bug 150240

Summary:	hard disk drive not found in installation
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1	Reporter:	Christian Wrobel <christian.wrobel>
Component:	Installation	Assignee:	E-mail List <kernel-maintainers>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf>
Severity:	Critical
Priority:	P5 - None
Version:	Beta 3
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	SuSE Linux 10.1
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	HWinfo.out file written by Yast / hardware detection Output of 'hwinfo --disk' Output of 'lspci'

Description Christian Wrobel 2006-02-12 16:28:19 UTC

I have a new MAXDATA PC (bought in December 2005) with 
* AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 939 CPU
* ASUS A8V-MX Socket 939 motherboard
* VIA K8M800 Northbridge
* VIA VT8251 Southbridge (for SATA controller) with 4 x UltraDMA and 4 x Serial ATA I / Serial ATA II hard disk drives
* Seagate Barracuda HDD S-ATA 160 GB ST3160023AS hard disk
in the BIOS AHCI V2.0 is activated (but I also tried with disabled AHCI)

with Microsoft Windows XP, all works fine, especially the hard disk access.

Now I wanted to use Suse Linux 10.1 beta3 (x86-64)

The problem is, that the hard disk is not found during installation process (neither in the text base simple installation program nor in the graphical YAST installation wizard).

Remark:the same problem occured already with SuSe Linux 10.0 Eval x86-64 version and SuSu Linux 7.3 (in 7.3 the hard disk was even found, the partitions were displayed correctly, but Linux assumed a total disk capacity of 2.3 TB! => thus I trusted NOT in the hardware detection).

I tried all 3 installation modeS: normal, without ACPI and Safe.

Always the same result occured:

Linux loaded the following 16 modules:
* ATAPI CD-ROM Driver
* Generic Mid-level SCSI Driver
* SCSI CD-ROM driver
* SCSI Disk Driver
* VFAT
* CRAMFS
* NFS Client
* ATA Disk Driver
* Floppy driver
* Generic PCI IDE
* VIA IDE
* EHCI Host Controller Driver
* UHCI Host Controller Driver
* USB Mass Storage Device Driver
* OHCI 1394 Controller Driver
* SBP-2 Support

But the disk drives menu entry showed always only 2 USB drives (from USB card reader devices) and 2 CD-ROMs (via IDE), but no hard disk drive.
And starting the real installation program ended in the hardware detection phase with the error message "no hard disk drive found" (and thus no partition definition possible). The extended hardware detection report shows again 2 disk drives (from USB card reader), 2 CD-ROM drives, but no real hard disk drive. Furthermore the VT8251 controller is detected and its "Details" shows very reasonable entries; but the hard disk controlled by it doesn't occur.

In the safe mode, I tried various combinations of additional modules (which from I assumed, they could perhaps cure the problem) to load, but in all case no hard disk were found again:
sata_via
sata_via + ide_generic
sata_via + ide_generic + ahci
sata_via + ide_generic + ahci + amd74xx
sata_via +  ahci
sata_via + ide_generic + amd74xx
ide_generic + amd74xx
ide_generic + ahci + amd74xx


Thus my question: what's going wrong? Are there bugs in the 10.1 beta or do I use the install programm wrong?

Can I supply further information to clarify the situation?

Any help is appreciated. Thank you very much in advance
  Christian Wrobel


PS: I tried to attach the HWinfo.out file, but it exceeds the 64KB allowed for this text field. If you want to see this file, plwase let me know, how I can send it to you.

Comment 1 Christian Wrobel 2006-02-12 16:33:09 UTC

Created attachment 67824 [details]
HWinfo.out file written by Yast / hardware detection

After the end of bug reporting, I found now a possibility to attach the HWInfo.out file.

Comment 2 Michael Gross 2006-02-13 11:33:33 UTC

Please attach `hwinfo --disk' and the output of `lspci'.

Comment 3 Christian Wrobel 2006-02-15 15:45:53 UTC

Hi Michael,

can you tell me, how I can specifiy  the "--disk" to the hwinfo command? The problem I have is, that I can not install the Linux at all (because no hard disk is available). The way I succeeded in writing the hwinfo.out file was: in the graphical Yast installation dialog I found in hardware detection / Details a button to write the file to Floppy DISK. Along this way I can not call the command manually and thus I can not specify any options.

It seems to me, that I need a trick, how I can call an arbitrary Linux command from the Installation dialog. Is it possible?

This would be also the basis to call the "lspci" command and send the output to you.

Comment 4 Michael Gross 2006-02-15 17:07:59 UTC

Switch to console 3 (Ctrl+Alt+F3) and enter the command `hwinfo --disk > out.txt', retrieve out.txt and attach it here. Same for lspci. If lspci is not included in the installation system, start the Rescue system from CD1 which can also be used.

Comment 5 Christian Wrobel 2006-02-19 19:43:50 UTC

Created attachment 69213 [details]
Output of 'hwinfo --disk'

Comment 6 Christian Wrobel 2006-02-19 19:44:49 UTC

Created attachment 69214 [details]
Output of 'lspci'

Comment 9 Jens Axboe 2006-02-22 12:47:22 UTC

Please retry with the next beta (beta5, I believe), we had some unfortunate SATA issues in the current version.