Haven't tried the Knoppix live-cd on it, but the Ubuntu Live cd freezes hard while booting (around the first tick of the progress bar - didn't check on the console what it was doing then sorry). And IIRC, Ubuntu live cd uses the same back end as Knoppix for hardware detection. Furthermore, there is an existing Suse 9.2 pro installation that works fine with more or less all the hardware, including the SATA hard drive and the optical drive.
There are already hard drive partitions set up - he is going to install over the old Suse 9.2 Pro installation which has a 10 gig ext2 partition and a 1 gig swap partition.
It really is a strange problem!!
Thanks, Hugo.
On 7/02/2005, at 3:27 PM, goldedge wrote:
Hi is your optical drive scsi or ide?
I suggest trying a Knoppix cd which will run independant of the hardware
and may give you an idea of compatability with the hardware without an install?
My other choice would be Mandrake 10.1 for a new user?
Another tip would be to have the existing hard drive partitions set up before beginning the
install as this makes it an install even easier.
Regards Michael
Sorry to do this, but anyway: **BUMP**
Someone must have some ideas? Please :)
-- Hugo.
On 5/02/2005, at 4:58 PM, hjv15 wrote:
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.
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