I'm trying to install debian but it's not detecting my hard drive. I have a serial ATA drive, I have never installed linux on anything other than an IDE drive before and don't know what to do here?

I thought maybe it was the distro so I have tried mandrake 10 and redhat 9, aswell as debian sarge but not one can detect my hard drive.

Mandrake 10 gives me the option to manually load drivers for the hard drive but i dunno what to load plus i want debian not mandrake. Debian gives no option to load drivers it just says it can't detect a drive and to make sure there is one connected to the machine.

Could it be that i used partition magic to partition this drive. I haven't made any linux partitions but have left 30gigs of space as FAT32 and plan to create the swap root etc partitions at installation.

Any ideas?

Doesn't sound good... if neither Mandrake nor RH could detect your Sata drive, then there's a good chance that there isn't a driver for it yet. What's the make and model ?

Cheers,

mj

It's a Western Digital WDC WD1600JD-75HBB0.

After doing some searching i have found this to be a recognised problem. I have a dell dimension 8400 and on the linux forums on the dell website there is a lot of information about this problem.

It appears that the kernel does not support this drive. So it's a waiting game for someone to create a kernel patch to get this sorted. Dell gives certain support for Redhat linux so if this is a known issue then maybe they should do something.

Annoying for me as i can't install linux

There was something similar on another post.

I think the solution there was to play around with the BIOS settings of the SATA controller and changing it from stand-alone to RAID. ( I think a bios update was required)

Well your right if i change the setting in my bios to use 'SATA/PATA combination' then the linux installation finds my hard drive however i can no longer boot into windows!

What i am faced with now is the option to switch to that setting in the bios and re-install windows using that setting. This is however a long job.

Another worry i have is that i don't really know what any of the different drive settings are in the bios. If i use this setting will it decrease performance?

Umm,isnt windows on the same drive?
Or are you useing windows on ide?
If windows is on the same sata hdd how could it boot without being set in the bios to sata/pata?


Sata drives=sata/pata in bios or it wont work.

Windows is on the same sata drive.

It boots because the hard drive is set up in the bios as raid. As i only have one drive then i don't need it to be set to raid but changing it means windows won't boot as it changes the way the drive works. However it needs to be changed as the kernel does not support it as raid.