angela120599
asked on
No drives found error
I recently bought a Dell PIII 550 MHz PC with a 13 Gig Ultra ATA hard drive. I went to install Linux using the step by step instructions provided, and when I selected to run Disk Druid I received the following error:
'An error has occured - no valid devices were found on which to create new filesystems. Please check your hardware for the cause of this problem.'
My hard drive has and still does work perfectly without any problems and the Partition Magic Utility seemed to work just fine. Also, I tried selecting each of the possible SCSI configurations, and none of them worked. I'm pretty sure that my hard drive does not use a SCSI driver, but I could be wrong. I get a similar error when I try to select fdisk. Can someone please help?
'An error has occured - no valid devices were found on which to create new filesystems. Please check your hardware for the cause of this problem.'
My hard drive has and still does work perfectly without any problems and the Partition Magic Utility seemed to work just fine. Also, I tried selecting each of the possible SCSI configurations, and none of them worked. I'm pretty sure that my hard drive does not use a SCSI driver, but I could be wrong. I get a similar error when I try to select fdisk. Can someone please help?
When you ran the Partition Magic utility, Did it create some free space to install the Linux in? What probably happened was Disk druid could not detect any free space to set up partitions in. You will most likely receive this error also in fdisk. I would try to rerun the partition magic utility and ensure that it created the free space needed to install your linux in. It is not necessary to create a new partition, You will do this in Disk Druid.
Double check and see. You can do this by running the dos fdisk and look to see if Partition Magic created the free space. Once the free space is created, then try the install again.
Let me know if this helps you at all
Marshall
Double check and see. You can do this by running the dos fdisk and look to see if Partition Magic created the free space. Once the free space is created, then try the install again.
Let me know if this helps you at all
Marshall
It isn't necessary to use Partition Magic to dual boot between Win 98/ NT / Linux. It seems a lot of people are having trouble installing this way. It can be tricky, though, if you don't know what you're doing.
ASKER
I do have LBA enabled in my BIOS, and I was able to create a partition seemingly successfully using Partition Magic and FIPS a number of times. I did verify using FIPS that the new partition was created completely. One thing, though, I noticed from my Windows help pages that I have a FAT32 file system on my drive rather that FAT16 like most computers have(it's a very new machine). The help pages said that a drive partitioned with this configuration will not be able to run Windows 95, 3.1x, or NT 4.0. Could this be the problem with the Linux installation? If anyone can confirm or deny this and propose a solution I would greatly appreciate it.
ASKER
Adjusted points to 70
Is this by any chance a DELL with a ATA/66 controller? If so linux doesnt really support them yet, there are workarounds in the linux Ultra-ATA howto
ASKER
Yes, it is a DELL, and it does have an ATA/66 controller. you think this is my problem? Will I be able to make my Macmillan Software install with some workaround or should I take it back? How can I find out more?
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(another page says that the drivers will be available (and i quote) "SOON!!!"
ASKER
Thank you very much j2.
Make sure LBA is enabled in the BIOS.