1 Topic by Jan_Reinhardt

  • Jan_Reinhardt
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Topic: no HD found

Hello,

I have screwed up. Unfortunately, I am not even sure this is the right place to ask for help. But since I have gotten here and browsed this forum, I decided to go for it. So heres the deal:

I still have an old Dell Computer (Pentium III) that was runnning Win XP fine.
I decided to give it a fresh XP install from scratch, and altered HD partition settings in the XP setup process. At some point when I was fiddling with the root partition, things stopped working.

When I now boot the machine, the BIOS identifies the hard drive, but neither Win XP nor the GParted Live CD finds an HD that I can use / set up partitions or whatever.

Please, how can i solve this ? I just frickin want one freshly formatted physical drive "C" that i can install XP or any Linux distribution on. Right now, software doesnt even recognitze a hard drive that could get partitioned.

Thanks, Jan

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
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Re: no HD found

It is possible that something went wrong in the installation process, that erased the partition table of the drive. It is even possible that some hardware issue is the source of this problem (controller, cable, cable contacts, power supply, RAM, ... ).

You don't mention the GParted version you use. We always recommend the latest stable version. What do you mean by "nor the GParted Live CD finds an HD" ? Don't you find any /dev/hda or /dev/sda?  Do you find any hard drive with no partitions on it?

You could use GParted livecd to rewrite the partition table of the hard drive by making a new partition table (it erases some parts of the first sector of the drive and so it deletes any existing partition and data).

Furthermore, you can use the Linux command
sudo fdisk -lu
from the terminal window and copy here the output of this command. It will give information on any hard drive it detects on the system.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by Jan_Reinhardt

  • Jan_Reinhardt
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Re: no HD found

i am using the latest gparted live stable version.

gparted does find NO hard drive with NO partitions on it. because of this i assume, all of gparteds options are greyed out except for "check for HDD device" or smth.

"fdisk -lu" results in no output whatsoever.
when i go "fdisk /dev/hda" i get the message "you will not be able to write the partition table" and "sector size is 2048 (not 512)".
this is really all i can say (or do) at this time. i have never dug so deep into these things...

thank you for your help. highly appreciated.

4 Reply by cmdr

  • cmdr
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  • Registered: 2008-07-30
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Re: no HD found

Hello Jan,

when i go "fdisk /dev/hda" i get the message "you will not be able to write the partition table" and "sector size is 2048 (not 512)".

This (/dev/hda) is obviously your CDROM drive with "GParted Live CD" in it.
Since your Dell is older, it probably has an IDE-ATA interface for HDD and CDROM drive. Therefore an "existing" HDD would have device name "hda" (CDROM "hdb"). For your interface hardware, HDD does NOT exist !

When I now boot the machine, the BIOS identifies the hard drive, but neither Win XP nor the GParted Live CD finds an HD that I can use / set up partitions or whatever.

Are you sure, that you did not accidentally disable HDD or one IDE channel in BIOS ?
If not, I would assume a connector problem or a severe hardware dammage to either IDE interface or - most likely - old harddisk (Pentium III -> 7 years ?).

Can you run a test with an external USB case for your drive ?

Regards
cmdr