NetBSD installer cannot find hard drive

[ionflux]

Dear All:

This is my first post to this forum. I have been using (and loving) FreeBSD for a long time and am now curious to try NetBSD. I decided to install it on my brand-new machine [HP Pavillion desktop with AMD Phenom X4 CPU (product number p6130y)]. The machine boots fine from the CD, but the installer cannot continue, as it cannot find any hard drive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you so much in advance for your help!

[Oko]

Originally Posted by ionflux

Dear All:

This is my first post to this forum. I have been using (and loving) FreeBSD for a long time and am now curious to try NetBSD. I decided to install it on my brand-new machine [HP Pavillion desktop with AMD Phenom X4 CPU (product number p6130y)]. The machine boots fine from the CD, but the installer cannot continue, as it cannot find any hard drive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you so much in advance for your help!

I am not sure if this can help you but I had similar experience with the newest DeLL OptiPlex 960 and OpenBSD 4.6 (amd64). The solution was rather simple. I got into the BIOS and looked HDD settings. These new machines come with some kind of stupid software RAID so you have to reset BIOS so that HDD is listed as legacy IDE (I have not try to set as SATA as it is the same crap). After that OpenBSD worked as a champ. The another hurdle for that particular OptiPlex (I think that the BIOS and the manufacturing date is something like 9th of August this year and I had it on 25th of August) is LAN controller. They come with stupid Broadcom Gigabit LAN card which is supported only by Vista not even by XP Windows
according to my IT guys. They brought to me computer pre-installed with XP professional (official university policy) and also brought me another PCI LAN card as they know that I will be putting Unix on it (I love our IT guys at Georgia State for allowing people to run anything they seems fit as long as they do not ask them for the support).

Best,
OKO

[ionflux]

Hi Oko,

Thank you so much for your prompt reply!
You were *right*!!

I entered the BIOS and changed the SATA controller to IDE, instead of RAID and now the installer recognizes the drive normally as wd0.

Strangely enough, Windows cannot boot with the RAID option disabled. Weird ...
It doesn't matter to me, as I am going to replace it with NetBSD anyways

Thank you SO much for your help!!

Very very much appreciated.

[Carpetsmoker]

Strangely enough, Windows cannot boot with the RAID option disabled. Weird ...

The problem is that Windows only loads the (S)ATA driver it used when it was installed. If you change this setting a different (S)ATA driver is needed, Windows doesn't load it and will be unable to mount C: so you will get a blue screen with UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME.

A workaround would be using a PCI (S)ATA controller, boot Windows and install the drivers for it. You can now boot from it. Then change the option (Or change mainboard) and boot Windows from the PCI controller. Then you can install the mainboard drivers and boot from the mainboard again.

[ionflux]

Hi Martin,

Thank you for your clarification! Very useful.
Guys, I am impressed by how quickly I received help here!

Thank you very very much.