Fedora 11 install -- no disk detected

[dkpatrick]

I tried to install F11 Beta on a disk containing F9. That's been booting successfully 'forever'. However, when F11 came down to selecting the disk, it didn't recognize the disk at all. This is an older Maxtor "DiamondMax" 80GB drive. On the same machine it DID recognize a Western Digital WD1200 (WD Caviar) drive. I make sure the jumpers on both disks were set to Master/Only.

I tried the installation using the downloaded DVD (newly downloaded today) and I also tried doing a network installation. The latter resulted in problems recognizing the keyboard or the mouse on different machines!

I tried my Fedora 9 drive on a variety of machines (4 to be exact) as well and also tried an older 40GB drive. All IDE. No luck. I successfully installed the Alpha release under VMWare, btw. Thus far, I cannot get F11 to recognize the disk although the hardware correctly recognizes it and I can still boot from it.

It's almost as if the drivers for the older drives disappeared. I teach Linux at a community college where we have nothing BUT older drives. I want to migrate my Fall classes to F11 but obviously cannot if this is a 'feature' :-)

[dkpatrick]

After further testing I've discovered that the two drives that didn't get recognized were both Maxtor DiamondMax drives. A third Maxtor (not a DiamondMax) was recognized. So I'm assuming now that the issue is with the Maxtor DiamondMax. Both DiamondMax drives will boot to the systems installed on them and both can be seen and mounted with Knoppix so it appears there's a driver problem for the DiamondMax

[masinick]

I have tried installing the Fedora 11 software on three different systems, and I have now tried three different ISO images as well, including the DVD, a smaller CD, and a Live CD. On all three of them, I have disk access issues. On a Compaq/ HP D530 with an 80 GB Western Digital IDE drive, the hard drive is not recognized at all. On a Gateway PA6A laptop, a sda5 partition previously containing a working Fedora 10 instance cannot be replaced or updated. I have tried both an installation and an upgrade, neither worked. I also tried installing on a Lenovo 3000 Y410 laptop with similar results and I have successfully installed there in the past as well.

What's up? Are there any known disk partitioning issues or restrictions with the current beta release? Ironically an Alpha test release worked. Also interestingly, I am able to run the Beta live, just can't install it.

Suggestions, work arounds, pointers to information about this appreciated. Bugzilla has been notified.

[AdamW]

There's no "drivers" for hard disks, only for the drive controllers. The operating system talks to the drive controller, and knows that there are certain devices of certain sizes attached to it, but it doesn't really deal with a Seagate hard disk any differently than a Maxtor one, for e.g.

Given that, your symptoms are a bit odd :) are you connecting both the 'failing' and 'working' drives in exactly the same way, to the same port on the motherboard?

[dkpatrick]

Speaking for myself, on all the machines I tried the hard drive was put into a caddy, inserted into a drive bay. In other words, my drives are removable. I used the same caddy for all the drives, making sure the jumpers were set identically: master or single. I successfully installed on a new Western Digital drive a couple of days ago.

Given that the DiamondMax drive would boot properly yet couldn't be detected by the Fedora 11 Beta leads me to believe it's a drive issue of some sort. Going into the BIOS it properly recognized the drives (Maxtor or other).

In terms of size, the failing drives were 40GB and 80GB. The drives that worked were 120GB and 320GB. I didn't try installing on the IBM 20GB drives I have available.

[marko]

You could try preupgrading to F10, then again from F10 to F11 Beta