Hi everyone, Last weekend I tried to install Ubuntu on a friends PC without luck (apparently the optical drive was unsupported...), and this weekend I gave it another go. We narrowed down the problem, and found it to be caused by the fact that his primary hard disc is on a SATA bus, and somehow as a result of this, it can't see the CDROM drive. It wants to insert the SCSI cdrom module, but breaks when it tries to automatically insert it - manually inserting the module also breaks (i.e. hangs).
The main hard disc appears to be detected - there is a /dev entry called: /dev/scsi/disc0/bus0/target0/lun0/part0 through 7 (the correct number of partitions for the disc), but neither the VFAT partitions or the old EXT2 partitions (from an old SUSE install) could be mounted (manually). We tried a bunch of options in the BIOS too, including so-called "Combined Mode" which makes the SATA channels look like IDE channels, and "SATA-only" mode which makes the other PATA ide channels look like SATA devices. We even tried buying and connecting up a SATA-to-PATA adapter from DSE to make the optical drive look even more like a SATA device but that didn't help. Interestingly there are no /dev/hd* entries at all (in any of the BIOS modes). I thought we could make an ISO image of the CD and put it on the old ext2 partition, and mount that partition, then mount the ISO as loopback, and install off that? but couldn't mount the ext2 partition like I said before. Any suggestions? We are pretty much at the end of our tethers... Regards, Hugo.
