Installing ubuntu – hard drive not detected

stewoo41

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I’m trying to install ubuntu 18.04.5 on an old HP Pavilion Vista laptop, using a bootable DVD disk. I can run a live session from this disk, but the hard drive is not detected, so installation is not possible. gparted only finds the optical drive.
 


G'day stewoo41, Welcome to linux.org

Do you know the history of this laptop ?.....Does it actually have a hard drive installed ?

A live session runs in memory (ram) so a hard drive is not necessary for that live session to be successful.
 
I’m trying to install ubuntu 18.04.5 on an old HP Pavilion Vista laptop, using a bootable DVD disk. I can run a live session from this disk, but the hard drive is not detected, so installation is not possible. gparted only finds the optical drive.
Hmm, then there is something wrong with your hardware... This should not happen. What does "dmesg" say? Is there any storage device listed? Or "ls /dev/sd*"?
UPDATE: Or maybe Ubuntu is broken at this point but I can't believe this because the Kernel knows about your hardware...
 
Hi Condobloke, yes, the laptop has a 232GB hard drive. Initially everything worked fine and I had Vista and ubuntu in parallel on the drive. Later I reinstalled to remove Vista. Something has gone wrong in the meantime and the situation is as described. Of course the hard drive could have died on me, but I'm still hoping this is not the case. From the terminal the command sudo fdisk -l returned disk /dev/loop0 2GiB etc and 8 further loops, but no sign of the hard drive.
In answer to hanez - I'm not familiar with dmesg, and it returns so much information I'm not sure what to look for!
 
can you boot the machine into BIOS and perform disk functions?

keith
 
Depending on kind of disk you have, you can try...

lspci -- some lines similar to these can help.
03:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Intel Corporation SSD 660P Series (rev 03)

05:00.0 RAID bus controller: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array G6 controllers (rev 01)

09:00.0 SATA bus controller: Western-Digital Hard Disk controllers (rev 05)
 
lspci showed a SATA bus controller among a load of other entries.

I got into BIOS > Diagnostics > Primary Hard Disk Self Test which returned "Hard Disk Not Exist", which suggests to me that the hard drive is in fact kaput :(. If I take out the existing 250GB HDD, are there any restraints as to what I replace it with - size, HDD or SSD, and would the new drive need any preparation apart for being formatted?
 
I think you're probably free to do what you want. I'd suggest an SSD, perhaps 500gb.

keith
 
I replaced the hard drive for the time being with an old 320gb HDD I had lying around. It was surprisingly easy, and all is well now, hopefully.
 
All this is probably true. I have a (similar) Toshiba A135 Satellite. When I got it, it had some Windows (7?) on it. I tried to install Linux Mint, but it failed. It turns out there was some sort of hybrid SSD/HDD drive installed from the factory. I replaced the drive with a regular WD HDD, and it installed Mint 32 bit with no problems. To this date that laptop will not recognize a straight SSD, and there are no BIOS updates available. So it runs a spinner, and works well.
 

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