1 Topic by Mojoshine

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Topic: No devices found

I may be posting in the the wrong forum, but here is my problem.

I am trying to install ubuntu (10.10 Meerkat) as a dual boot, with vista already installed.

When I get to the third page of the install process, there is a cross on the line which reads
"has at least 2.6Gb available drive space".  So the installation stalls right there.
When I open the Gparted, from the toolbar, Gparted opens and states "No devices found".
It does see the cd/rom drive and its contents but nothing else.

The system is new, the motherboard is a GIGABYTE X58A-UD3R, and the hard drive is a SATA 1TB seagate.
I used windows disk management to shrink the C: drive to 600Gb. With the rest as unallocated.

My cd live boot disk is good,  I downloaded it using a torrent today, and checked it using Md5 checksum.
The torrent was recommended by http://members.iinet.net.au/~herman546/p23.html.

I haven't been able to find a similar problem on these or the ubuntu forums.
Thanks, so much for any help.

2 Reply by gedakc

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Re: No devices found

Would you be able to provide the output from the following two commands?

fdisk -l -u

where one of the options is a lower case "L" and not the number one.

parted /path-to-your-device unit s print

where /path-to-your-device is something like /dev/sda.

3 Reply by Mojoshine

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Re: No devices found

The first command returned nothing.

The second command I tried was as follows
parted /dev/sda unit s print

Returned
Warning: You are not superuser. Watch out for permissions.
Error: Could not stat device /dev/sda - No such file or directory.
Retry/Cancel

When I tried echo $PATH
I got
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usrbin:/bin:/usr/games

So I am guessing its simply not finding my hard drive. There is no sound either.
Graphics is fine.

Thanks

4 Reply by gedakc

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Re: No devices found

The above commands will need root privilege to access the disk devices.

With Ubuntu, you can run commands with root access by prefixing the commands with "sudo ".  E.g., sudo fdisk -l -u

5 Reply by Mojoshine

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Re: No devices found

I burned a new cd, and checked for errors using ubuntu. Result was no errors in disk.
I tried the comands in sudo and had the same response as before.
Then I tried :   sudo df -h       with the following result.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
aufs                  1.6G   43M  1.6G   3% /
none                  1.6G  292K  1.6G   1% /dev
/dev/sr0              694M  694M     0 100% /cdrom
/dev/loop0            661M  661M     0 100% /rofs
none                  1.6G  104K  1.6G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                 1.6G   16K  1.6G   1% /tmp
none                  1.6G   92K  1.6G   1% /var/run
none                  1.6G  4.0K  1.6G   1% /var/lock

Still a newbie to all of this. But enjoying the learning curve.

6 Reply by gedakc

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Re: No devices found

From your description it appears that no hard disk drives are recognized at all.

Would you be able to check the computer BIOS settings to see if the hard drives are recognized by the BIOS?

Usually to access the BIOS you need to press a key while the computer is booting up.  The key to press is often shown briefly on the monitor screen while the computer boots.

7 Reply by Mojoshine

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Re: No devices found

I have already got Windows vista installed and running, on this machine. The BIOS recognises hard drives, floppies, etc etc
I read a line on  the link I posted from herman...(post 1) that if you use windows disk management to shrink your hard drive( which I did) you risk linux not being able to 'see' your hard drive.
Since I am still tweaking this new system and I have the windows vista installation cd, I could start the whole process again.

I intend to use Ubuntu for bash scripting and C++. But I am still a beginner in these languages. I also want to use JDK for java, which is why I wanted the dual boot for windows.
I read somewhere that you can install JDK ok in ubuntu.
Then if I had all three in ubuntu working fine, I could get a windows virtual machine to run windows when I need to.

But I don't want to wipe everything I have already done right now, to find that ubuntu still wont find my hard drive.

8 Reply by gedakc

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Re: No devices found

One option you might want to try is using GParted Live which contains a newer version of GParted.

9 Reply by Mojoshine

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Re: No devices found

I did finally fix this problem. No devices found - because I was using a 32bit version of Ubuntu, when my machine is running 64 bit. Intel Core 7 is 64bit.  I now use Fedora .  Fedora automatically gave me a 64 bit version , when I downloaded it.  Thanks for taking the time to help me anyway. : )

10 Reply by gedakc

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Re: No devices found

Both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of GParted _should_ find the same devices.