Ubuntu-less

November 17th, 2007 by matt

Since my Thinkpad T43 came back from IBM having been repaired, I can no longer run Ubuntu on it: the hard drive is no longer detected. This is pretty disastrous…

I’ve posted the details of the problem to the Ubuntu forums.

If anyone reading this can help I’d be much obliged!

8 Comments »

8 Responses to “Ubuntu-less”

  1. on 17 Nov 2007 at 2:05 pm1 Jim Campbell

    Hi Matthew,

    I had a similar problem on my Thinkpad T60. Check your bios to see if, under your config menu, there is an option for your SATA hard drive.

    My hard drive wasn’t recognized when the system was using AHCI Mode, but changing it to compatibility mode allowed the drive to be recognized during the linux installation.

    I’m not sure if you can switch back to AHCI mode after the installation – I haven’t tried.

  2. on 17 Nov 2007 at 2:34 pm2 matt

    Jim,

    Thanks for the reply. unfortunately my BIOS doesn’t appear to have a config menu for the hard drive. There is just about everything else, but not a hard drive section. :(

  3. on 17 Nov 2007 at 3:46 pm3 Jim Campbell

    Hi again,

    I do have a T60, so mine might be different, but I went back and checked . . . the exact route to the bios option on my computer was:

    \Config > Serial ATA > SATA Controller Mode > AHCI / Compatibility Mode.

    I just thought I’d specify that it wasn’t a hard-drive only option. Any SATA/hard disk related bios config might be worth exploring.

    Jim

    P.S. Re-enabling the AHCI setting allows my computer to work ok, but I’ve read that this setting might break suspend/resume.

  4. on 17 Nov 2007 at 10:40 pm4 matt

    Jim – nope, I don’t have anything like that in my BIOS config. Nothing to do with the hard disk at all…

  5. on 18 Nov 2007 at 12:29 am5 Sashko

    Try to detect it with LiveCD (any distro: Backtrack, Ubuntu, whatever.)

  6. on 19 Nov 2007 at 8:16 am6 rapidoda » Blog Archive » Ubuntu-less

    [...] sourced here [...]

  7. on 20 Nov 2007 at 1:57 am7 earobinson

    that sucks dude, hope you get it working.

  8. on 05 Jan 2009 at 4:22 pm8 Markor

    I hope that thing with HD not recognized on laptop is long solved but since there is no confirmation and it seems i can`t post to forum..

    Did you try to flash BIOS with previous BIOS version or something?
    If you eneter XP install CD, does XP recognize HD during install?
    Is something done with that low-level format someone suggested?
    Did you try some newer *Ubuntu (8.04, 8.10)
    or some other Linux distribution CD to see if you can see Hd?

    And finally, what solution you applied in meantime? ;)

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